When he says the main performance benefit is when games over tesselate, I'd say this is just an invitation for everyone to increase tesselation and bump mapping for more detail.
"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.
"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."
Well bump mapping happens in the pixel shader so that wouldn't affect tricounts. The traditional to way fight "too many triangles" is with LODs, but LODs aren't the perfect solution since triangle-screen density changes with camera settings too.
I wouldn't expect massive, massive gains from the new culling, as suggested. The instancing demo gets gains only because it didn't have any CPU-side frustum culling to begin with. But real games have frustum culling nowadays.
