There's an interesting thing happening in forums with these revelations happening. Months ago, there was much optimism and props given to AMD for their focus on tessellation in DX11, and from that came the assumption that NVidia put no work into it, and if they supported it at all, it would be some late additional, half-assed, bolted-on, or emulated tessellation and would not perform as well as AMD's. I'll note for the record that much the same story was repeated with Geometry Shaders (speculation that NVidia would suck at it, and that the R600 would be the only 'true' DX10 chip) AMD has had some form of tessellation for several generations all the way back to N-patches, so there's some logic to these beliefs. Also, the Fermi announcement mentioned nothing about improvement to graphics (only compute), so there has been a tacit assumption that the rest of the chip is basically a G8x with Fermi CUDA tacted on.
But as more and more leaks seem to indicate that NVidia has invested significant design work into making tessellation run very fast, it seems like some are in disbelief, while others are now starting to downplay the importance of tessellation performance and benchmarks (whereas once it was taken for granted that this was AMD's strong point) If indeed NVidia has significantly boosted triangle setup, culling, and tessellation, this could be like G80 all over again, where the total lack of information caused people to assume the worst, and the final chip coming as a big surprise. I think they deserve much props if they did increase setup rate.
As Mint said, it's been far too long to leave this part of the chips unchanged. Setup seems exactly where it was 10 years ago.
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