XDC2012: OpenGL futures [LWN.net]

XDC2012: OpenGL futures

Posted Oct 10, 2012 1:43 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: XDC2012: OpenGL futures by dgm
Parent article: XDC2012: OpenGL futures

Right, once you're dealing with a significant number of textures then the texture load alone is probably more expensive than just pushing the pixels over the wire. Acceleration primitives make sense when you're doing nothing but drawing rectangles, but once you're beyond that point the reason you're using a GPU is because it's faster at turning your scene into a 2D image than the CPU is, not because you're using less memory bandwidth that way.

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XDC2012: OpenGL futures

Posted Oct 11, 2012 10:15 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Still, doing the rendering at the client side when the client side is networkologically remote means that your X server (which is very likely to have a fast 3D-capable GPU) will see its GPU going unused, while the server (rather less likely to have a GPU) suddenly has to do GPU tasks... probably using llvmpipe. Ah well.

XDC2012: OpenGL futures

Posted Oct 11, 2012 15:17 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (guest, #5198) [Link]

If this is a significant concern, for a large multi-user desktop server, then you can stuff GPUs into it to offload rendering, this is what other VDI solutions support such as VMware.