Terrain Rendering Algorithm Performance Analysis

Nowadays, the flight guidance equipmentsupplies practically all the information, required for aircraft navigation.Pseudo-realistic terrain visualization is undoubtedly an important part of thisinformation. Although modern graphics processors are able to render realisticterrain at interactive frame rates, in some applications, it is beneficial touse low-power graphics hardware, perhaps from weight or power supply capacityrestrictions. These low-power graphics processors typically manifest much lowercomputational power than conventional hardware, severely limiting thecapability of terrain visualization. A novel method for caching terrain tilesis presented in this paper, enabling faster and more detailed terrainrendering, using lighter devices that consume less power. The main focus was onmemory and time efficiency on common low-power graphics hardware. The terrainrendering algorithm being employed in our implementation is derived from theseamless patches algorithm. Different aspects of terrain tile swapping wereexamined in order to devise a simple hardware metric. An efficient tile cachingapproach was developed, based on this hardware metric, and its performance wasevaluated.