A Multi-threaded Multi-context GPU Methodology for Real-time Terrain Rendering

Abstract

Real-time rendering of large terrains has several important applications. Hence, many methods have been devised to solve this problem. The main challenge for such methods is to deal with a large terrain dataset and maintain interactive frame rates. In this paper, we propose a level-of-detail (LOD) based multi-threaded multi-context method that works on two separate activities. Each activity is assigned to its own CPU thread and GPU context. The LOD hierarchy is constructed on the GPU context of the errors activity and stored as a 2D texture map. This texture map is used by the blocks rendering activity via its CPU thread to initiate the rendering process by sending different terrain blocks as translation and scaling parameters to its GPU context, which uses a reusable single shared vertex and index buffer to render the required block based on the passed parameters and the height-field texture. The results show that the proposed method achieves high interactive frame rates at guaranteed very small screen-space errors.