| Description: | VirtualGL is a toolkit that allows most Unix/Linux OpenGL applications to be
remotely displayed with hardware 3D acceleration to thin clients, regardless
of whether the clients have 3D capabilities, and regardless of the size of the
3D data being rendered or the speed of the network.
Using the vglrun script, the VirtualGL "faker" is loaded into an OpenGL
application at run time. The faker then intercepts a handful of GLX calls,
which it reroutes to the server's X display (the "3D X Server", which
presumably has a 3D accelerator attached.) The GLX commands are also
dynamically modified such that all rendering is redirected into a Pbuffer
instead of a window. As each frame is rendered by the application, the faker
reads back the pixels from the 3D accelerator and sends them to the
"2D X Server" for compositing into the appropriate X Window.
VirtualGL can be used to give hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities to VNC or
other X proxies that either lack OpenGL support or provide it through software
rendering. In a LAN environment, VGL can also be used with its built-in
high-performance image transport, which sends the rendered 3D images to a
remote client (vglclient) for compositing on a remote X server. VirtualGL
also supports image transport plugins, allowing the rendered 3D images to be
sent or captured using other mechanisms.
VirtualGL is based upon ideas presented in various academic papers on
this topic, including "A Generic Solution for Hardware-Accelerated Remote
Visualization" (Stegmaier, Magallon, Ertl 2002) and "A Framework for
Interactive Hardware Accelerated Remote 3D-Visualization" (Engel, Sommer,
Ertl 2000.) |
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