GPU Ray-Casting for Scalable Terrain Rendering

With the ever increasing resolution of scanned elevation models,geometry throughput on the GPU is becoming a severe performance limitation in 3D terrain rendering.In this paper,we investigate GPU ray-casting as an alternative to overcome this limitation,and we demonstrate its advanced scalability compared to rasterization-based techniques.By integrating ray-casting into a tilebased GPU viewer that effectively reduces bandwidth requirements in out-of-core terrain visualization,we show that the rendering performance for large,high-resolution terrain fields can be increased significantly.