GPU Based Rendering of Global Scale Terrain Data

Photorealistic terrain rendering has long been an active research topic in computer graphic and 3D GIS. If they are global scale detailed, digital terrains can represent a huge amount of data and therefore of graphical primitives to render in real-time. A dynamic, realistic and fluent rendering scheme for large scale terrain was proposed in this paper, based on LOD tiles, pre-reading strategy and GPU based acceleration. Multi-resolution terrain of global dataset was used for view-dependent data control and grid simplification, and multi-thread mechanism was employed for visibility clipping and data exchange among memory, cache and disk. Experimental results of real data and comparisons with traditional method demonstrate the feasibility, robust and practicality of our method.