Brute force chunk NO-LOD terrain

I’m still not sure whether this is a good idea but here is the idea. I managed to get texture splatting working on the brute force terrain. I’m testing it using a laptop that defaults to nebula’s fixed function render path. Using the fixed function, I have to do a pass for each detail texture. I’ve set the shader to use 4 details textures so 4 passes. I’m still getting a decent frame rate of about 60 but as always a new problem rears its ugly head.

Distant primitives look very obviously tiled. So I had a bright idea (I think). I want to split the terrain mesh into chunks. I believe the beauty of brute terrains is that the entire terrain is uploaded once into the graphics hardware, now I want to split the beauty of it?

With Splatting

Without Splatting

The whole point of chunking it is so that distant chunks will be rendered using the large diffuse texture and a single pass. Chunks closer to the current view will be rendered using a splatting shader and a number of detail textures. I’m not trying to gain any speed improvements but rather to get rid of the tiling in distant geometry. I’m thinking I should get a trade of by gaining some speed for reducing the number of passes in distant geometry and loosing some speed for sending more batches of geometry so I’m hoping for pretty much the same frame rate as I’m getting now with splatting.

Wish me luck.