2 research outputs found
High-performance terrain rendering using hardware tessellation
In this paper, we present a new terrain rendering approach, with adaptive triangulation performed entirely on the
GPU via tessellation unit available on the DX11-class graphics hardware. The proposed approach avoids
encoding of the triangulation topology thus reducing the CPU burden significantly. It also minimizes the data
transfer overhead between host and GPU memory, which also improves rendering performance. During the
preprocessing, we construct a multiresolution terrain height map representation that is encoded by the robust
compression technique enabling direct error control. The technique is efficiently accelerated by the GPU and
allows the trade-off between speed and compression performance. At run time, an adaptive triangulation is
constructed in two stages: a coarse and a fine-grain one. At the first stage, rendering algorithm selects the
coarsest level patches that satisfy the given error threshold. At the second stage, each patch is subdivided into
smaller blocks which are then tessellated on the GPU in the way that guarantees seamless triangulation