[1] The successor of the SIP block branded "ATI TruForm" was included into Radeon HD 2000 series (available from June 2007 on) and newer products: hardware tessellation with TeraScale.
It is designed to increase visual quality, without significantly impacting frame rates, by utilizing hardware processing of geometry.
To enable the feature without causing visual problems, such as ballooned-up weapons, the models had to have flags identifying which areas were to be tessellated.
The lack of industry-wide support of the technique from the competition caused developers to ignore the technology.
However, Radeon 9500 and higher (as well as hardware supporting Shader Model 3.0) include Render to Vertex Buffer feature, which can be used for tessellation applications.