Tracking Graphics State For Networked Rendering
Ian Buck,
Greg Humphreys and
Pat Hanrahan
Stanford University
Appears in the Proceedings of the 2000 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware
Abstract:
As networks get faster, it becomes more feasible to render large data sets
remotely. For example, it is useful to run large scientific simulations on
remote compute servers, but visualize the results of those simulations on one
or more local displays. The WireGL project at Stanford is researching new
techniques for rendering over a network. For many applications, we can render
remotely over a gigabit network to a tiled display with little to no
performance loss compared to running locally. One of the elements of WireGL
that makes this performance possible is our ability to track the graphics state
of a running application.
In this paper, we will describe our techniques for tracking state, as well as
efficient algorithms for computing the difference between two graphics
contexts. This fast differencing operation allows WireGL to transmit
less state data over the network by updating server state lazily. It also
allows our system to context switch between multiple graphics applications
several million times per second without flushing the hardware accelerator,
resulting in substantial performance gains when sharing a remote display
between multiple clients.
Paper
Greg Humphreys