Well, after much extended experimentation, I found option #3 works the best.
Using option #1, 4096 separate surfaces on a single mesh, it ground the engine down to about 12fps, on an nVidia 5900 Ultra.
Option 2 isn't really an option.
Option #3 - Create 256 meshes, each with 16 surfaces. This worked very well, and would be how I imagine programs like ALE work to make up large landscapes. I could fit quite a large number of these meshes onto screen and still max out the FPS. Even 512 meshes (a 128X64 map) worked without speed impedence, with 8192 surfaces.
An interesting thing I found though - while moving around this terrain while zoomed in, it would be very jaggy while moving over "new" areas, then once they were viewed, this movement would be smooth and fast. I attributed this to allocating chunks to video memory, and confirmed it by zooming my camera out to view the whole scene, doing an update and render without a flip, then zooming in to the correct level and re updating/rendering/flipping in the main loop - at which stage because it had all been "viewed" in the non-flipped render, it was now all fast and smooth. What is the cause of this? Does Blitz not load objects into video memory when they are created, only when they are first viewed on-screen?
Using option #1, 4096 separate surfaces on a single mesh, it ground the engine down to about 12fps, on an nVidia 5900 Ultra.
Option 2 isn't really an option.
Option #3 - Create 256 meshes, each with 16 surfaces. This worked very well, and would be how I imagine programs like ALE work to make up large landscapes. I could fit quite a large number of these meshes onto screen and still max out the FPS. Even 512 meshes (a 128X64 map) worked without speed impedence, with 8192 surfaces.
An interesting thing I found though - while moving around this terrain while zoomed in, it would be very jaggy while moving over "new" areas, then once they were viewed, this movement would be smooth and fast. I attributed this to allocating chunks to video memory, and confirmed it by zooming my camera out to view the whole scene, doing an update and render without a flip, then zooming in to the correct level and re updating/rendering/flipping in the main loop - at which stage because it had all been "viewed" in the non-flipped render, it was now all fast and smooth. What is the cause of this? Does Blitz not load objects into video memory when they are created, only when they are first viewed on-screen?