Tessellation
Tessellation is GPU hardware subdividing coarse geometry into finer triangles on the fly, adding surface detail without storing a dense mesh.
Also known as hardware tessellation, geometry subdivision
Not measurable from a browser
A browser cannot read temperatures, power draw, fan speed, VRAM capacity, clock frequency or native FLOPS. For a direct reading use a native monitor such as HWiNFO64, GPU-Z or lm-sensors. SystemCheck contributes the other half: whether the condition is costing you throughput, measured as decay and consistency.
A tessellation stage takes patches of low-polygon geometry and subdivides them by a factor chosen at runtime, then displaces the new vertices using a height map. It lets a model carry modest geometry in memory and gain fine detail only where the camera is close enough to see it.
The factor matters enormously. Subdividing beyond the point where triangles are smaller than a pixel wastes throughput outright, and history contains notorious cases of games tessellating hidden geometry to absurd levels. Driver-level tessellation caps exist precisely because of that.
Tessellation has largely been superseded by mesh shaders and virtualised geometry systems such as Nanite, which solve the same problem with better scaling. WebGL2 has no tessellation stage at all, and WebGPU exposes none in its initial specification, so SystemCheck's GPU workloads do not use it, a point worth knowing when comparing a browser result to a native benchmark that does.
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