On-the-fly decompression and rendering of multiresolution terrain

• Authors: Peter Lindstrom;Jonathan D. Cohen
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games
• Year: 2010

We present a streaming geometry compression codec for multiresolution, uniformly-gridded, triangular terrain patches that supports very fast decompression. Our method is based on linear prediction and residual coding for lossless compression of the full-resolution data. As simplified patches on coarser levels in the hierarchy already incur some data loss, we optionally allow further quantization for more lossy compression. The quantization levels are adaptive on a per-patch basis, while still permitting seamless, adaptive tessellations of the terrain. Our geometry compression on such a hierarchy achieves compression ratios of 3:1 to 12:1. Our scheme is not only suitable for fast decompression on the CPU, but also for parallel decoding on the GPU with peak throughput over 2 billion triangles per second. Each terrain patch is independently decompressed on the fly from a variable-rate bitstream by a GPU geometry program with no branches or conditionals. Thus we can store the geometry compressed on the GPU, reducing storage and bandwidth requirements throughout the system. In our rendering approach, only compressed bitstreams and the decoded height values in the view-dependent "cut" are explicitly stored on the GPU. Normal vectors are computed in a streaming fashion, and remaining geometry and texture coordinates, as well as mesh connectivity, are shared and re-used for all patches. We demonstrate and evaluate our algorithms on a small prototype system in which all compressed geometry fits in the GPU memory and decompression occurs on the fly every rendering frame without any cache maintenance.