This paper describes a hierarchical visibility technique that significantly accelerates terrain rendering. With this technique, large parts of the terrain that are hidden from the viewpoint are culled, thus avoiding the expense of uselessly sending them down the graphics pipeline (only to find in the z-buffer step that they are hidden). The hierarchical visibility technique has been implemented in a multiresolution terrain rendering algorithm and experimental results show very large speedups in some situations.
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See the related horizon computation paper.
@inproceedings{Stewart-egrw97,
author = "A. James Stewart",
title = "Hierarchical Visibility in Terrains",
booktitle = "Eurographics Rendering Workshop",
year = "1997",
month = "June"
}