This paper presents a novel GPU-based multiresolution rendering on sole-cube maps (SCMs), which is a variant of geometry images built upon spherical parameterization. Given spherical parametrization of a manifold mesh, the sphere domain is gnomonically projected to a closed cube, which constitutes the 6-chart sole-cube maps. A quadtree structure of SCMs and normal map atlas are then constructed by using the regular re-sampling. Then, by packing the quadtree nodes into the SCMs texture atlas, a new parallel multiresolution rendering is processed on the latest GPU in two rendering passes: the multiresolution node selection in fragment shader; the triangulation in vertex shader followed by the node culling operation in geometry shader. The proposed approach generates adaptive mesh surfaces dynamically, and can be fully implemented in GPU parallelization. The proposed scheme alleviates the computing load of multiresolution mesh refinement on CPU, and our GPU-based multiresolution rendering is demonstrated with a variety of examples. Our user study confirmed that the visual quality of the SCMs multiresolution rendering, in comparison with the meshes/geometry images rendering, is also highly efficient especially for complex models in large-scale virtual environment. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.