GPU-tesselation was already possible with the geometry shaders in DX10.
DX11 has its own tesselation unit to generalize the handling
Nevertheless, awesome feature

@Toast: Thanks, I didn't know that, I thought that Cascades demo by NVidia used geometry shaders? Not sure, though.

I absolutely adore the roof tiles, they loook so awesome. Is that displacement technique really only geometry-based or is there still some raytracing involved? I can see steps and filtering issues sometimes, that's why I ask.

The Cascades demo uses geo shader.
There is no ray-tracing involved, but the tesselation is adaptive and so you get more (partly extreme) detailed geometry close to the camera

My understanding was that there's more about it than just an 8bit greyscale displacement map by also giving info on which parts should get additional details first for the adaptive tesselation. That's more about math than doing art which is why I doubt it's possible to just let a standard 2D artist do that...

That's why you need to actually model the high poly 3D shape / train your guys to use ZBrush so it's still more painting than modelling. For normal maps you could be sloppy when creating them for not so obvious surfaces as the effect doesn't work that good anyway when being really close - that's different when you actually create real geometry...

The map wich stores the information for the adaptive tesselation can surely be calculated using an integral of a limited area around the current pixel taken from the corresponding normalmap.

Just made a screenshot from one of the videos, because one can see most from the glitches:

http://www.puppenheim.org/directX11.jpg

I guess that you don't need more preparation than you already needed for parallax mapping, the big disadvantage of parallax is that the edges didn't change, though.

Concerning the art workflow: I am working on a new sci-fi texture set. And this time I model every texture as a high poly model in Modo. Then I bake normal map, height map and ambient occlusion map into a single plane. This is very easy in Modo, it can be done with a single click for each of them.

And I can assure you: With a tool like Modo it is exactly the same speed as when I painted them in a 2d tool (The GIMP). Sometimes it is even faster and more simple. Actually I also just paint some objects only in 3d.
So I don't agree that creating art became more slow this way. But we need more sophisticated tools to do so.

Here is an image how it looks in C4 engine with parallax and horizon mapping:

http://www.firma-geppert.de/Gamedev/Images/scifi2/c4_wall_hor.jpg



And here is another image with good old normal mapping applied:

http://www.firma-geppert.de/Gamedev/Images/scifi2/pipes.jpg



The same maps would be perfect for displacement mapping in DX11, the underlying polygons just need the right resolution for tesselation. I watched this in the Heaven demo and they carefully built each geometry with an evenly distributed polygon flow.

Very nice work Frank! And the video was amazing. Although that shot of the glitches bothers me a bit... as it really tears the immersion.