A Hybrid GPU Technique for Real-Time Terrain Visualization

Real-Time terrain visualization plays an important rule in multiple popular applications like geographical information systems, computer games, or civil or militar simulators, where hardware tessellation has become a de-facto standard nowadays in the graphic pipeline. Also, post-processing techniques enhance the appearance of the rendered image by applying changes at the pixel level using the fragment shader, without increasing the number of polygons, but they have not been still used in terrain rendering due to different reasons. In this paper, we present a new real-time terrain rendering approach which efficiently combines hardware tessellation and parallax mapping, making parallax mapping compatible with hardware tessellation and terrain rendering. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme improves the performance of real-time terrain rendering applications in regard to the performance yielded when exclusively using hardware tessellation.