I studied various approaches to terrain systems in game engines a bit, trying to get acquainted with the work. Some details seem simple, but I get a hang on one part.
For performance reasons, many embossed solutions use shaders to generate parts or all geometry, such as vertex shaders to generate positions or tessellation shaders for LoD. At first I realized that these approaches were exclusively for visualizations that did not concern physical modeling.
The reason I'm talking is because, as I understand the shaders at the moment, the results of shader calculations are usually discarded at the end of the frame. Therefore, if you rely heavily on shaders, the geometry information will disappear before you can access it and send it to another system (for example, physics running on the CPU).
So, am I mistaken about shaders? Can you save the results of their generation for access to other systems? Or am I forced to save the terrain geometry on the CPU and leave the shaders for other details?
source
share