A navigation device for a vehicle , comprising: - a database storing, for a plurality of tiles of a tiling , at least one triangulated irregular network, TIN, defining a three-dimensional surface of map data, characterized in the database further storing for a plurality of triangular faces of the at least one TIN, control information defining a nested bounding sphere for the respective triangular faces, wherein the database stores for each tile two TINs , wherein each tile comprises two triangular faces of a first TIN and each tile comprises four triangular faces of a second TIN , and wherein the triangular faces of the second TIN are substructures of the triangular faces of the first TIN , - a processor coupled to said database and configured to calculate a screen-space error for the plurality of triangular faces based on the respective control information and based on at least one of the following: a viewing angle of an electronic map view , a virtual camera position of the electronic map view , and predict whether a triangular face is visible in the electronic map view based on the calculated screen-space error, - a working memory , wherein, if the processor predicts that a certain triangular face is visible, the processor is configured to load from the database the tile comprising the certain triangular face into the working memory, - a graphical processor configured to render the electronic map view based on the virtual camera position and the viewing angle such that it comprises a terrain representation based on the three-dimensional surfaces defined by those tiles which are loaded into the working memory , wherein the graphical processor is configured to render the electronic map view such that, depending on a threshold comparison of a distance between a tile and the virtual camera position, either the first or the second TIN is used for calculating the respective terrain representation. - a database storing, for a plurality of tiles of a tiling , at least one triangulated irregular network, TIN, defining a three-dimensional surface of map data, characterized in the database further storing for a plurality of triangular faces of the at least one TIN, control information defining a nested bounding sphere for the respective triangular faces, wherein the database stores for each tile two TINs , wherein each tile comprises two triangular faces of a first TIN and each tile comprises four triangular faces of a second TIN , and wherein the triangular faces of the second TIN are substructures of the triangular faces of the first TIN , - a processor coupled to said database and configured to calculate a screen-space error for the plurality of triangular faces based on the respective control information and based on at least one of the following: a viewing angle of an electronic map view , a virtual camera position of the electronic map view , and predict whether a triangular face is visible in the electronic map view based on the calculated screen-space error, - a working memory , wherein, if the processor predicts that a certain triangular face is visible, the processor is configured to load from the database the tile comprising the certain triangular face into the working memory, - a graphical processor configured to render the electronic map view based on the virtual camera position and the viewing angle such that it comprises a terrain representation based on the three-dimensional surfaces defined by those tiles which are loaded into the working memory , <EOS>