tessellation

The reason it's not called vertex program is because the pipeline is defined in terms of stages (vertex -> tessellation control -> tessellation evaluation -> geometry -> rasterizer -> fragment).

They are not suitable for tessellation, which funnily enough is better done by tessellation shaders.

No tessellation or compute shaders, among other things that were added in 4.2, 4.3, or 4.4.

That's definitely false, we aren't virtualizing brains, we don't have sapient AI, and Mesa still needs tessellation shaders.

Today's 3D hardware includes features like geometry shaders/tessellation, but most games don't use them.

The Heaven benchmark has proven time and time again to be entirely irrelevant, due in no small part to it's insane usage of tessellation.

Additionally, yield goes up (given an independent manufacturing defect density), and especially for large die, the tessellation around the edges has a major impact.

I googled for tessellation infinite plane algorithm but could not find any pertinent information.

It allowed me to do Tessellation and use Deferred rendering.

I did some stuff with terrain LOD by using tessellation, but that is a DX 11 feature and not supported in WebGL yet.

There are also some really rough tessellation techniques in use to simulate ground snow walking in games out now, like that Assassins Creed with the native americans.

It does have tessellation support and a programmable pipeline.

And even if you say "well, if you don't have a tessellation capable GPU, get a new one" there is still the problem of the Linux drivers being at 3.3 right now, and older versions of OSX only supporting 2.1.

And it would even get more confusing if you drop the first shader: "A program consists of a vertex program, tessellation control program, tessellation evaluation program, geometry program and fragment program." So for the sake of it being easy to talk about, a (shader) program is the whole thing, whenever somebody talks about a "program" it's the whole assemblage.

Tessellation shaders are actually pretty flexible, and can do most of the things that you might have thought geometry shaders would be suitable for.

Tessellation shaders were a part of GL 4.0.