Hi everyone, Im creating a project that divides 3d applications into different monitors for display... Im thinking of getting the frame returned by a 3d openGL application and dividing it into n monitors... Then the monitors will have the job of displaying their assigned part of the image. Is there a way to get the frame returned by a 3d openGL application? What can I use to display the 2d images passed by the server to the monitors.? What can I use to display a sequence of images.? that will look like an animation//? Tnx in advance... -Marc Glenn Jamon

Quote:Original post by marcglennjamon
Hi everyone,

Im creating a project that divides 3d applications into different monitors for display...

Im thinking of getting the frame returned by a 3d openGL application and dividing it into n monitors...

Then the monitors will have the job of displaying their assigned part of the image.

Is there a way to get the frame returned by a 3d openGL application?

glReadPixels will do this for you. However reading data back from the hardware is very slow so this may not be the best option for you.

Quote:
What can I use to display the 2d images passed by the server to the monitors.?

Assuming you have an opengl context for each monitor you can draw a textured quad on each monitor with an image on it. You have to upload the new image every frame, but this is doable.

I think a better option would be to render the scene multiple times, once for each monitor and only display the portion of the scene that is visable on a given monitor. You should be able to cull the offscreen portions of the scene for each monitor to speed things up a bit, also any cpu processing you do can be done only once and shared.

What does your hardware configuration look like here? Do you have multiple display adaptors in one system or is it a single multihead device? Are you using multiple systems? If it is a single device you may be able to use some built in spanning support functionality, although good support for this is often spotty.