Intel Researchers Presented A New Large-World Tessellation Approach

"A concurrent binary tree (CBT) is a GPU-friendly data structure suitable for the generation of bisection-based terrain tessellations, i.e., adaptive triangulations over square domains. In this paper, we expand on the benefits of this data structure in two respects.

First, we show how to bring bisection-based tessellations to arbitrary polygon meshes rather than just squares. Our approach consists of mapping a triangular subdivision primitive, which we refer to as a bisector, to each half-edge of the input mesh. These bisectors can then be subdivided adaptively to produce conforming triangulations solely based on half-edge operators.

Second, we alleviate a limitation that restricted the triangulations to low subdivision levels. We do so by using the CBT as a memory pool manager rather than an implicit encoding of the triangulation as done originally. By using a CBT in this way, we concurrently allocate and/or release bisectors during adaptive subdivision using shared GPU memory.

We demonstrate the benefits of our improvements by rendering planetary scale geometry out of very coarse meshes. Performance-wise, our triangulation method evaluates in less than 0.2ms on console-level hardware."