Abstract: To investigate real-timerendering of terrain surface, improve the speed of rendering and the fidelity ofsimplification, the algorithm taking the distance from vertex to average plane as theerror metric and progressive meshes based dynamic simplification was used, which providedview-dependent simplification of the model. The use of triangle strips and quickly cullingfaces outside the view frustum also contributed to fast rendering of terrain surface. On aP　Ⅱ　300 machine the algorithm achieved a speed of 71ms per frame, and the renderingquality could be accepted. The error metric based on distance from vertex to average planecan produce high fidelity of dynamic simplification, and reduce the complex computationwhen rendering.