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VirtualGL - A toolkit for displaying OpenGL applications to thin clients
- 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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