Planet-sized batched dynamic adaptive meshes (P-BDAM)

This paper describes an efficient technique for out-of-core management and interactive rendering of planet sized textured terrain surfaces. The technique, called P-Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes (P-BDAM), is based on BDAM structure. Data is partitioned into a set of BDAM tiles, each of them constituted by a pair of geometry bintrees of small triangular patches and an associated texture quadtree. Each triangular patch is a general triangulation of points on a displaced triangle. The proposed framework introduces several advances with respect to the state of the art: thanks to a batched host-to-graphics communication model, we outperform current adaptive tessellation solutions in terms of rendering speed; we guarantee overall geometric continuity, exploiting programmable graphics hardware to cope with the accuracy issues introduced by single precision floating points; we exploit a compressed out of core representation and speculative prefetching for hiding disk latency during rendering of out-of-core data; we efficiently construct high quality simplified representations with a novel distributed out of core simplification algorithm working on a standard PC network.