Whats best for terrain engines

Whats the best way to optimize a terrain engine? Ive been testing some techiniques I didnt found nothing that looks like flight simulator 2002 terrain engine.

Tested:
ROAM/C-LOD with basic frustum culling
Quatrees

check out the resources at gamedev.net under Game Programming. they have several articles on landscape and terrain engines.

b

That depends on what you want to do.For a small terrain(say 1024x1024 for example) you could easily get away w/ a bruteforce(yuck!) approach on todays cards.But if you’re shooting for larger sizes(say 10k*10k) then nothing can beat a CLOD approach w/ some paging etc.Beware though that such an approach needs heavy optimization to work well,or it might turn out slower than a much simpler method.If you’re just starting I’d recommend Bryan Turner’s implementation of split-only at gamasutra.