Although they are still quite some time away, it looks like the consoles of tomorrow might get some serious tessellation support. This is not so surprising knowing that the console refresh comes in 2012, at least according to our well informed industry sources.

Knowing what manufacturing process should be available in 2012 you can expect 22nm chips in the best case scenario, chips that will get much more power efficient and way faster than what we have today. If you take in the account that the current high end core such as GF100 and soon to launch GF110 and Cayman have some 3+ billion transistors you can easily guess that the 22nm parts can theoretically pack almost four times as much. You will probably agree that twelve billion transistors sounds quite ridiculous.

Tessellation looks good, even on GF100-based products which were six months behind schedule and even mainstream parts such as Geforce GTX 460 can deliver good tessellation support. The new Barts-based Radeon HD 6850 and HD6870 boards can pull off some nice tessellation too. The cards of tomorrow will most likely do it many times faster and PC games could benefit a lot from tessellation on consoles, simply as developers care and make more money off console games.

If they develop native tessellation on consoles it will definitely find its way to PC too, unfortunately only at some point in 2012.