I’ve written an application that renders data acquired by a surface topography gage. Currently, I am computing vertex normals for lighting and using a 1D texture for applying a color gradient. Everything looks ver good, but I’m running into some performance problems with large data sets when using lower end video cards. The large data sets are around 512x512 data points.
I’ve been thinking about how I can an increase in performance. 90% of the time the entire data set is in view so frustum culling would not help me. I know this is similar to rendering terrains and I was curious if using a bumpmap texture would give the cool lighting (or close) that I’m getting now, but render more quickly. I’m not familiar with the topic (obviously), but I’m willing to learn more if it seems like it would help my app.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Pat