Material Tessellation VS 3D Model

Development Platform & Builds Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling
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I’m learning about 3D assets and performance optimizations right now and have a question about using materials with tessellation vs 3d models.

Let’s say I need a cobble stone wall. I could use Blender or ZBrush to make this wall by adding the geometry into a shape that would pass as a cobble stone wall. There would be clear stones ‘stacked’ on top of each other in a ‘random’ grid like manner.

OR, I could make a plain vertical plane and import it into Quixel Mixer and create a material that looks like a cobble stone wall. It would basically look the same. The end result is a wall with cobble stone like geometry.

So, one asset is created by forming the geometry into the desired shape (Blender/ZBrush) while the other is having the material system generate the geometry using the tessellation features in the materials editor of UE4.

Is one better than the other?

My assumption is that creating the 3D model with the geometry ‘baked in’ is the way to go. There’s nothing to process since the geometry is already there. No need to tessellate.

Or, is there a performance advantage with tessellation since we can configure the quality based on the distance from camera? Obviously we have LODs for the 3D models, but is one method of detail reduction better than the other? Considering Nanite in UE5, will both of these options be irrelevant? Will Nanite technology also work with tessellated materials?

Sorry for the flurry of questions.

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Tessellation can be turned off by game settings by any somewhat competent user, thus breaking your presentation.

Aside from that, its a performance sinkhole.

Forget Nanite, it’ll be years at this rate.
Also they did say already that tessellation is getting deprecated.

take the heightmap you get from quixel, throw it into blender or whatever and modify a densily quadrangulated plane with it. Then simplify the geometry to a number of tris you can be happy with (remembering that at the lowest level a wall is noy a 4 vert plane, but an 8vert box, because you don’t want light issues).