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Is terrain generation on GPU possible/supported?
I am interested in using Unity to continue developing my project which involves life size, continuous level of detail, procedurally generated planets. In order to be able to fly across the surface of planets with reasonable speed and with the terrain detail keeping up, it would be necessary to generate it on the gpu rather than on the cpu. So I am wondering if this is possible and if so how convenient/inconvenient it would be to 'bend' Unity to this end? Would it require a pro-licence?
Just FWIW. Could you search on the 100s of "LOD" (and similar terms) questions on here? I instantly found many long discussions.
Answer by ahmadabobakr · Feb 21, 2016 at 09:56 AM
Of curse it is possible you can generate the terrain using a compute Shader and it would be much faster than using the CPU method however copying the data back to the CPU (to generate colliders) would most probably result to poor performance. so as long as you are just rendering it would be OK p.s : you can generate the terrain using a Perlin noise