A new compact level-of-detail representation, called hierarchical surface fragments, for geometric objects with highly complex shape is presented. The representation comprises a set of irregular unstructured sampled surface fragments, whose boundary is a circle viewed along its normal. An efficient algorithm to construct the representation is described. In depiction of the framework for visualization, a screen tile technique for acceleration of rendering is proposed. Since an approximate z-buffer algorithm is adopted to fast determine visibility of each rendering primitive, a new buffer, z-delta-buffer, is designed to facilitate solving the problems raised by the approximation and to improve the image fidelity. Finally, a solution is provided to integrate our rendering approach for hierarchical surface fragments with traditional polygon-based methods.