With the ever increasing resolution of scanned elevations, the efficiency of terrain rendering is still unsatisfactory in three-dimensional visualization. In order to improve the speed of terrain rendering, we had studied the root cause of the undesirable visualization efficiency in Visual Terrain Project, and found that one of the performance limitations was elevation color generation step. Therefore, we proposed a modified algorithm on the basis of data parallel mode, which can be well performed on GPU. Experimental results show that application performance is raised significantly by data parallel algorithm, and the improved algorithm can obtain satisfactory simulation results via CUDA.