A happier example

Not all of the additional polygons in the DX11 version of Crysis 2 are wasted—far from it. For instance, we were looking for tessellated objects in the scene above, when we saw this:

Those bricks alone the side of the window are incredibly detailed and are almost surely the result of tessellation with displacement mapping. In the DX9 version of the game, those bricks won't have individual contours or variation like that. Make no mistake: this is a lot of polygons, again approaching one poly per pixel in places. Still, this is an addition to the game that genuinely improves image quality.

Unfortunately, because there's a little patch of water out on the horizon, this entire area has a tessellated water mesh beneath it.