Terrain guidelines?

I realize every situation is unique but I am being anything but optimal right now…if anything I am being ridiculously opposite of optimal…

I am just messing around with heightmaps and importing various maps I have made in various programs. With only the heightmap and 3 textures applied I am getting upwards of 160 draw calls, 80k tris, 48k verts. Now I am new to this and am not sure what is considered excessive but I am guess that is pushing into those bounds.

When making Height Maps, or better yet generated terrians I can modify and then pull a height map out of, what programs would you recommend? and what should I look to do to keep everything within reasonable bounds. 160 draw calls with a 1000 far clip range with nothing but a terrain (looking across a flat area where my town is gonna be with a mountain range in the back) seems like to much.

I am developing on my gaming machine though so it has ungodly good specs and I don’t think I could make this crawl if I wanted too.

Increase the pixel error of the terrain…the default of 5 is generally too low.

–Eric

Thanks! Even small increases in that has made a tremendous difference. Just increasing it to 10 dropped roughly (+/- depending) 100 draw calls