A Hybrid Approach For High Quality Real-Time Terrain Rendering And Optimized A-Priori Error Estimation

This paper describes a hybrid approach for high-quality real-time terrain rendering. The contributions of the work are twofold. First, a novel parallel preprocessing scheme for necessary a-priori error-bounds calculation based on the widely applied longest-edge-bisection approach is proposed, which exploits current multi-core CPU architectures. Compared to the common recursive and thus computationally expensive procedure, a significant performance increase can be achieved. Second, a novel method for view-dependent terrain rendering is described which combines the advantages of triangle-based CPU and patch-optimized GPU algorithms. We exploit frame-to-frame coherence by caching refined geometry on local VRAM in combination with an optimized update process. In contrast to patch-based methods, a substantial reduction of the number of primitives and rendering time can be achieved.