Cluster based real-time rendering system for large terrain dataset

In this paper we propose an efficient system for rendering large terrain data in a cluster environment. Both geometry and texture data are stored in the server, constructed and optimized as pre-computed static quadtree. Hierarchical view frustum culling and view-dependent texture and geometry refinement is performed through a top-down traversal algorithm in the client. We guarantee overall geometric continuity and exploit programmable graphics hardware to achieve low CPU overload and high triangles throughput. Speculative terrain data prefetching is exploited for hiding network delay. Large datasets can be rendered in real-time with our system and the performance is almost independent of the dataset size.