Terrain performances

Yesterday I compared the rendering speed of Irrlicht and APOCALYX. I used the same MS3D model and the performences were almost the same. Now it’s the turn of terrains.
I have extracted the height-map, the color-map and the detail-map from an Irrlicht demo. Then that data was read by an APOCALYX “infinite terrain”. The results are shown in the following screenshots.

Irrlicht above, APOCALYX below

It’s difficult to compare the results, because Irrlicht simply applies the color-map (that becomes the main texture) to the height-map, then superimposes the detail-map. In addition when you reach the border of the map, you can see an unrealistic linear cut all around. Instead, APOCALYX applies a color-map (that defines the shadows and the overall color) to the height-map, then a coarse-map (a periodic main texture) and, finally, superimposes the detail-map. No cuts are noticeable if the heigth-map presents toroidal boundaries.
As you can see, I had several difficulties in setting the same parameters in the two demos, but I got two roughly comparable pictures at the end. Unluckily, this time APOCALYX loses 220 fps against 260, but I think that there are too differences for a reliable comparison, because the two kind of terrains possess different advantages: more detail in Irrlicht, larger landscapes in APOCALYX.