Dynamic Retopology of terrain (for performance)

[JeffGillin]

I was just thinking of a feature. Perhaps it already exists out there. But even if so, I think it should be a standard thing. I'm not a shader guy - I know the basics. Vertex, Fragment, and only done some training on other areas. I believe this would be the tesselation shader, but I aldo don't know wtf. I know this shader stuff has changed somewhat again with certain phases. Anyways, it would be sick to have auto (dyanmically at rutime) tesselated terrains to keep the performance high (less geometry for distant portions of the terrain). Maybe it wouldn't be only the terrain but any object that spanned a long distance in depth from the camera. I'm also saying this as someone who doesn't know all the terrain tricks - in fact, I don't know any of them..., and also not sure how the renderer handles these situations by default.