Abstract: To provide the illusion of smooth motion during zoom or pan operations of an interactive map display, relatively unimportant map elements are not rendered during map movements. By reducing the number of elements to be rendered in each frame during the movement, a map display rendering engine can increase its frame rate, thus providing the illusion of smooth motion. At the completion of the zoom or pan operation, the omitted elements “fade in” by successively rendering the same frame with the omitted elements' opacity gradually increasing in each frame. The selection of map elements to omit during map movement is made by comparing a dynamic value stored with each layer of map elements to a rendering performance value, which may be based on the computational power of the rendering engine, and may be set upon installation of the map software.