Conventional image generation techniques rely largely on polygon rendering techniques. We describe here a system that uses off-the-shelf hardware to realize high-end image generation. We have developed a prototype image generator based on two Intel 1860 processors and a host 486-PC. This hardware performs perspective transformations, clipping, and texture mapping. Parametric surfaces are generated by fitting either a bilinear or bicubic polynomial to standard Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) terrain height data. Real-time texture mapping algorithms are then used to place realistic textures, obtained from real-world photographs, onto the terrain height map. In our implementation, a multiresolution image pyramid is used to generate properly filtered images on demand at the resolution required by the viewing geometry. A wide range of terrain data approximations is used depending on altitude. Coarse (fine) approximations are implemented for high (low) altitude flight. A multiresolution terrain pyramid is used to achieve this approximation. This pyramidal approach is embedded into our real-time texture mapping system with the use of an incremental scanline algorithm. The current prototype can generate a 256 × 256 × 8-bit image at 15 frames/second using only two i860 processors, and the algorithms scale sub-linearly with the number of processors.