Hi. I’m trying to render a terrain reading data from a heightmap. I used the Nehe’s tutorial, and the map size is 800x600.
I can run the program propertly when I set the QUADS size down to 4 (that means 800/4 and 600/4 vertices), but when I try to render the full map (800x600) it turns very slow.
Do I have any options? I really need to render the full map because I need a high quality map. I red something about putting the work onto the GPU instead of the CPU.
Any help?
Thanks.
That’d be 800x600x2 triangles, or about 1 million triangles, per frame. It’s never going to run fast. What you will find is that you don’t actually need to render them all, as most of those triangles will be so far off in the distance that no-one will be able to tell the difference.
Cas 
Simplest way would be to use an existing engine with level of detail support like jme or xith3d.
If you want to do it on your own, read some of the articles linked in
http://xith.org/forum/index.php/topic,2.msg1078.html#msg1078
Some other resources are here:
http://www.vterrain.org/LOD/Implementations/.