High-performance terrain rendering using hardware tessellation

Abstract

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.