DRONE: A Flexible Framework for Distributed Rendering and Display

The available rendering performance on current computers increases constantly, primarily by employing parallel algorithms using the newest many-core hardware, as for example multi-core CPUs or GPUs. This development enables faster rasterization, as well as conspicuously faster software-based real-time ray tracing. Despite the tremendous progress in rendering power, there are and always will be applications in classical computer graphics and Virtual Reality, which require distributed configurations employing multiple machines for both rendering and display. In this paper we address this problem and use NMM, a distributed multimedia middleware, to build a powerful and flexible rendering framework. Our framework is highly modular, and can be easily reconfigured – even at runtime – to meet the changing demands of applications built on top of it. We show that the flexibility of our approach comes at a negligible cost in comparison to a specialized and highly-optimized implementation...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISVC
• Authors: Michael Repplinger, Alexander Löffler, Dmitri Rubinstein, Philipp Slusallek
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Available Rendering Performance, Example Multi-core Cpus, ISVC 2009, flexible Rendering Framework