Tesselation

At first i thought tessellation was engine dependent, and could only be implemented via a game's in-game settings. I was wondering though if any of you shader magicians over here would have any insight on the topic. Is it possible to implement tessellation as a post-process technique to ostensibly increase polygon count/model smoothness?

I would assume there are some limitations, but even some convincing trickery might have the potential to look really nice.

Short answer
No.

Long answer
Tessellation is an additional render stage one adds to the existing pipeline, it's not something that can be applied after rendering already finished. Also, tesellation alone does nothing, you need some sort of displacement map for your geometry so the additional polygons can actually moved to some place so the model looks smoother or whatever you want it to look. Tessellation itself will just increase the polygon count, but NOT alter the visuals in any way. You wouldn't see a difference. So this is something the game developer has to implement specifically for the game and not something that can be added via ReShade.

Hahahh well thanks for both answers . But really i appreciate the thorough explanation. I was afraid it would be the case that it was contingent on how/if the developer wanted to implement it, i just figured it couldn't hurt to ask. I'm kinda new to reshade and just trying to get an understanding of what things are in the realm of possibility given it's inherent limitations.

On that note, this might be a weird question to ask you but as the godfather of reshade, i'm really curious what's going on in your mind at this point.... are there any types of advanced shaders that you know could be possible, and would like to see implemented ,that just haven't been made yet? Or is it kind of the case that we've pretty much reached the limits of what's possible to do via post-processing.

Anyway, thanks so much for continuing developing this awesome framework, you've literally created something that 99% of PC gamers consider one of the biggest advantages of playing on a PC