S!
SoW was originally started in OpenGL I think, but changed to DirectX at some point. I can be wrong but got this impression when ages ago they talked about re-doing the gfx engine etc. SoW will be DirectX 9.0c also as we have seen screens (WIP) where stated this was on lowers render DX9. So this caters for those that do not have nor want to invest in DX11 cards yet. Wise choice IMO from Oleg & Team, broader audience with more options available yet the same sim for all.
As of tesselation. In AvP it was used here and there and looked nice. But frankly I did not even note it unless I really checked for it. Sure the Unigine HEaven v2.0 is a great show of it, especially for nVidia but it is at that stage only a synthetic benchmark to me as there is no AI, physics or other stuff a game has. Just an empty world with lot of tesselation around.
XFX did drop nVidia Fermi, both 470/480GTX, from it's lineup for a reason we can only speculate of. They invest instead to new upcoming ATI cards and refreshing those that are in the market. Discussion is hot all over the place, but speculating is pointless as we do not know the details.
Nevertheless..SoW will be the new benchmark as IL-2 was 10 years ago..and still goes on strong thanks to continued support from Oleg/TD
