Application of GPU for large real-time 3D terrain rendering method
Bin Ye · Computer Engineering and Applications Journal · 2011
This paper will present an easy-to-implement algorithm for rendering terrain on GPU.By moving the height field lookup and aggregated LOD handle from the CPU to the GPU,the vertex positions can be calculated in the vertex shader which are combined with hierarchical index template.Then,only one API calls for all triangles by using a suitable primitive to index terrain vertices.Finally,the extra vertices are simply added at the end of the buffer to fill the cracks which may occur.Thoseskirt verticescan be able to represent all indices as some triangle_lists.Thus,it is no longer necessary to perform per frame vertex buffer updates.The presented algorithm reduces the system memory and CPU requirements.