Abstract for HONS 01/14
Applying Tessellation to Clipmap Terrain Rendering
Corey Barnard
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
University of Canterbury
Abstract
Recent graphics hardware has introduced a number useful techniques that can be applied to
terrain rendering. In this report, we describe some of the issues with terrain rendering, such as
performance. We describe our framework for implementing terrain rendering algorithms which
help to reduce implementation complexity. We explore the possibility of applying recent
hardware and API features to the Geometry Clipmaps algorithm proposed in 2004. Our
implementation is described, which makes use of the nested grid structure introduced in
Geometry Clipmaps, as well as recent hardware tessellation features in modern GPUs. Some
experiments are carried out to evaluate the new approach. Compared to the original algorithm
from 2004, our implementation improves performances by 71%.
