You should organize your geometry in a spatial subdivision structure, for example a kd-tree, bounding volume hierarchy, octree or regular grid. This problem is not as easy as it seems and has been...

There a lot of research to be done in the field of image-based rendering and model acquisition. This ties in to the content creation proposed by Jan. Idealy, we'd like to just walk through a room...

I'm sorry for the late reply, qzm; I haven't read these forums for some time.

I tried to use NV_fence, but it appears not to be supported on my system (Linux-x86_64 185.18.08, NVidia GTX 260?)
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I doubt it. GL_NV_shader_buffer_load says:

18) Is the address space per-context, per-share-group, or global?

RESOLVED: It is per-share-group. Using addresses from one share group in another...

I've done a lot of work on multi-threaded opengl recently; so some observations from my side in this wonderful world of race conditions and driver segfaults :)

- Use the 185 series nvidia driver...