1. A 3D scalable surface rendering method having the steps of: inputting a surface function, utilizing a surface preprocessor to create a database from said surface function in a storage medium, said database containing a quad-tree data structure, where each node contains a fragment that has one or more manifold triangle meshes, accessing said database in said storage medium from a client system utilizing streaming requests, said streaming requests being established according to view setting inputs; determining visibility of nodes of said quad-tree using said view setting inputs; determining a quad-tree node set used for rendering based on the portion of the quad-tree data structure that has been retrieved and stored in available memory, according to said visibility determination component; said surface renderer producing 3D geometry primitives based on said node set; and said 3D geometry primitives rendered on a graphics display.