GPU-based real-time terrain rendering: Design and implementation

Abstract

Terrain rendering has been a hot spot for many years. How to improve the rendering efficient and get more smoothing terrain with massive data has become the focus of the terrain rendering research recently. In this paper, we present a real time rendering algorithm based on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and tessellation technology. In the preprocessing stage, we build two separate restricted quadtree, logical tree and data-tree. The logical tree is used to reduce the memory usage and logical information is operated on logical tree. Then we compute the nodes (patch) that are satisfied with LOD (Level of Detail) and view frustum culling using logical quadtree. This stage is used to minimize nodes passed to GPU to save GPU memory. To fully use the GPU computational capabilities, we adopt the tessellation technique in the triangulation stage instead of the traditional triangulation methods. With the tessellation technique, all the triangulation work is done by the hardware which saves much more rendering time, and improves the rendering speed highly. In addition, by adjusting the tessellation factor, the terrain crack is avoided easily. In the experiment, it proves that the method can highly reduce the processing time and get a feasible result.