I know is a vague question, but I've no expertise in GIS world. I was building this terrain map for a game like simulation project that i'm invested in. Data accuracy is least or no concern, but the quality of the terrain it generated. I'm not storing 27GB of data, instead i'm procedure'ly generating the height maps, from low quality SRTM30(couple of GB) as i need them. I use mainly gdal and interpolation( Kriging), numpy and some scikit learn. But i was unable to do this in real time.
My question is this, which DEM format is most suitable for gdal or an expensive loop to work with, to produce close real time result. Is their other choices?.