Improve Rendering Performance with Gridding

Are you looking for a way to prepare your data to help with rendering performance? There is an updated sample which shows you how to dynamically grid and split your polygons into smaller regions thereby allowing them to draw more quickly.

What we want to do is get the average tile render time to be as low as possible. Typically, the features that take the longest time to draw are high point-count polygon layers. Imagine you are rendering a low-level tile that is essentially blank. Most places are empty space at the lowest level, containing perhaps only a small road segment or something similar. To render this, you typically use the country / region polygon as your map background. There may also be large polygons, while not in view, will be loaded as the tile being rendered is within their spatial bounding box. In order for that simple tile to draw, it needs to read the large region polygon, which may have thousands of points. While most or all of the points are clipped at run-time, it still takes time to load from disk, transform to well-known binary, clip them, etc.

With this utility you take your original high point-count polygon and split it with a grid, with size depending on the target scale, so that most of the old polygon’s area is made of very simple squares with each being composed of just the square’s edges. When your simple tile goes to draw, it finds the simple square, draws it and the entire process avoids loading and drawing the thousands of points. The new dynamic gridding sample makes it even more efficient as it will decrease the number of grids by creating large grids in the center of bigger features.

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