ACCELERATE TERRAIN RENDERING USING PROGRAMMABLE GRAPHICS HARDWARE

Multiresolution representations are often used in terrain rendering systems to increase system performance. To avoid popping effects, these systems usually utilize geomorphing technique, which may be presented as the bottleneck of the system. With the recent advance of graphics hardware, that is, the programmability, we try to decrease the CPU load by shifting the geomorphing from CPU to GPU. But this doubles the data amount that needs to be transferred through graphics bus. By carefully organizing terrain data in compact format, we can reduce the data amount to about 40 % of the original. These techniques help us to accelerate the rendering process about 30 % to 100%, compared with standard OpenGL implementation