Noddybear

Ah so you just draw one of each size terrain chunk, instance them to fill everywhere else, and then use the vertex shader to change the heights? Thats very crafty! I never thought to do it that way... I guess that instancing wouldn't work if you were building planetary terrains because of the curvature would not be easy to instance Does your technique use any geomipmapping as well?
-Thanks

Ah that sounds interesting! I'm using Simplex noise to generate my terrain so I could move it over to the vertex shader I guess... Although I have a feeling that it'd be a bit of a bitch to port to hlsl! Is the transform matrix stored in the textures? Btw, my current node size is about 65x65 because I was under the impression that rendering any number of triangles below about 4k would take the same time as 4k to render
-Thanks!

I can't really justify computing all vertices and then uploading them to the GPU in a buffer, because it tends to completely fill my video memory :/ It means i'll have to stream in data as i compute it, and then unload it when im done...I agree that roam is not really a good solution. The kernel of the problem is just the processing time it takes to calculate positions of large chunks of terrain (which is what i've been doing with geomipmapping) so what i'd really like is a method to somehow collect indexing chunks together so i could run geomipmapping with quadtrees using smaller chunks of vertices without incurring the costs of rendering to the screen each block individually At the moment each chunk has its own index and vertex buffer