Nope - didn't even know it could be manipulated on that level. (I guess it is possible that I, despite efforts not to, write things with a tone of certainty that projects a level of know-how I am nowhere near to possessing, in which case I'll have to work on improving my disclaimer-to-guff ratio.
).
So I suppose delaying a highly detailed terrain LOD's beginning to draw, by some relative distance, could indeed possibly reduce its initial aliasing, at the obvious cost of delayed graphical fidelity gratification, which could be an interesting experiment -- see if one could find a comfortable balance, and whether it differs between different resolutions/supersampling levels, and fields of view. :7
( All imperfections become doubly apparent in VR, due to its so far much lower angular resolution. Some headsets may boast 4k screens, but where X pixels over 1 degree of field of view really is X pixels over 1° of
actual viewed FOV in VR, they become effectively compressed on a monitor, that displays a 100° rendered FOV over something like 40° of the player's real-world FOV, depending on monitor size, and how far from it the player chooses to sit. :7 )
The flashy graphics hound in me kind of wish we could rather have such quality to the procedurally generated LODs and textures (I am guessing maybe no just-in-time cycles are spent on making mipmaps for procgenned stuff...), and to the filtering algorithms that sample them, that less balancing was needed in the first place, but that is of course prohibitively computationally expensive. (I've got a whole unwritten rant pressure-cooking, about how we need an order of magnitude more computing power in order to get
last "generation" games to render with satisfactory graphics and physics (EDIT: ...at satisfactory frame rates), and at least one more for the next (man, how I'd love to see Elite raytraced, at high resolution and recursion count, and with physics/IK that actually gives an impression of objects interacting) - a far cry from the at best 50% increase between GPU generations.
)
I have no idea how long various terrain LODs are buffered before they are flushed - I guess it depends on available VRAM, and your distance and travelling direction/velocity trend... (I am assuming (... in the spirit of the need to make it clear I have no idea what I am talking about, this is probably a good place to add some stress on:
assuming) consistent mesh subdivisions by two, as one approach, and texture patches retaining the same bitmap size, for each such half-by-half smaller and smaller patch of geometry.)
