How many vertices are needed to draw reasonably good-looking terrain?

Posted by bobbaluba on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by bobbaluba
Published on 2014-05-24T16:56:14Z Indexed on 2014/05/27 22:20 UTC
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Performance

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terrain

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terrain-rendering

I have some pretty expensive code in my terrain vertex shader, and I am trying to figure out if it will still be fast enough.

I haven't yet developed a level-of-detail system for my terrain rendering, but I can easily benchmark my code by just drawing mock triangles. My problem is, how do I know how many vertices to test with?

Are there for example rendering engines that will tell me how many terrain vertices are currently on-screen? Or maybe it is possible to create a formula that will give me an estimate based on screen resolution?

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