I appear to be outnumbered here. My choices seem to be to either proclaim that ''2560 x 1600 is more screen space than anyone will ever need'' or go buy a pair of glasses, then a second monitor :-)

Shawn Hargreaves: I'd still want two of them :-) LOL point taken - but I've actually tried it, and it's too much space for my eyes to cover efficiently. I just ended up getting really dizzy :-) Edit: I would add one thing: If you get two screens, make sure identical ones! If you get different ones, color differences and/or vsync diffs can ...

Scott Guthrie (who is a guy who really knows what he's talking about) has just blogged about how to speed things up in VS.NET. Shawn Hargreaves:People who have never used two don't realize what they are missing, but once you try a second, I promise you will never go back. ..unless they get to work on a 30'' widescreen from Dell or a 30'' ...

Since your footer says something about an MMOG, I thought I would just give a word of warning: The only *real* way to make sure people don't mess with your online game is to make your server authoritative. That means that all important ''business logic'' only happens on the server, and the client really only acts as a front end to whatever the ...

Yeah, sorry, I didn't make that clear: The Progressive Mesh sample I mention was only for inspiration on how it is achieved. I don't think there's any way around rolling your own, but if you get a clear picture of how the LOD algorithm should work, the rest - custom content processor and custom model - is fairly simple.

The DirectX SDK managed code sample ''ProgressiveMesh'' I think is what you're looking for. The documentation/source for that SDK sample may be a bit shallow. Actually, sitting on my desk right now is the book ''Level of Detail for 3D Graphics'' by David Luebke et al., which deals with the subject thoroughly. I should say that I've only ...

Just to keep this interesting thread alive: I refactored my simple terrain comparison test so that I basically only have one chunk of terrain with 32*32 vertices. I then keep separate ''height vertex buffers'' for height values only, and just draw the same 32*32 mesh over and over again, feeding in the appropriate height vertex buffer and let ...

I agree with Melvil - reduce your number of draw calls first by using larger tiles. That was actually my point with demonstrating a 256*256 vertice terrain using only one Vertex/IndexBuffer at 850 fps: It seems that LOD-ing or space partitioning efforts may hamper performance instead of boosting it because of the way modern hardware works ...

PIX works fine - try it out!

I just set up a simple terrain to compare: Single VertexBuffer with 256*256 vertices and a single IndexBuffer, which gives approx. 130.000 triangles, no textures and a simple BasicEffect with VertexPositionColor elements. I draw the whole ''mesh'' using DrawIndexedPrimitives(). It renders everything with no culling at around 850 fps on a ...