What factors influence TerrainViz performance?
TerrainViz performance depends more on the CPU capabilities than on the GPU speed because the terrain tessellation computed by TerrainViz does not produce a huge set of triangles. But because tessellation is computed at each frame, the calculation of the mesh is very CPU consuming. The tessellation is done on the total amount of data supplied. For instance for an input terrain of 10000*10000 (height values) the total number of triangles would be 10000*10000*2 = 200 million triangles! The process consists of evaluating these 200 million triangles and approximating the geometry to keep some thousands of triangles to reproduce the terrain. This process is time consuming. Whereas in Open Inventor the number of displayed triangles can be the main limit, in TerrainViz, the tessellation is the primary limiting factor. The GPU performance and amount of RAM become more important for texturing needs when working with a deep quadtree of textures.
