From: Allan Schaffer (allan++at++sgi.com)
Date: 07/23/2004 10:30:41
Hi folks,
First, many thanks to Tom & Gordon for jumping in!
We do our best to keep up with the mailing list traffic but occasionally
close deadlines & high workload cause dropped frames, high latency, or
culling artifacts.. :-)
Bernie Kirby wrote:
> Does anyone have a performer3.1.1 app that uses
> multiple compositors?
>
> We have an onyx4 with 3 compositors, but as yet, we've not been
> able to effectively get a single performer app to 'drive' the
> multiple compositors.
We've been seeing this also. The pfCompositor interface is working well for
the Onyx IP-based systems with HW compositors but there's still work ongoing
for HW compositors on Onyx4 UV-based systems. These improvements are going
into Performer 3.2.
> This leads to questions:
>
> How do you tell a pfCompositor which actual compositor to use?
> What are the 'rules' for addressing each compositor?
> If I wanted to (for example) just run a graphics program on
> (say) the third compositor using just it's two cards, how can I
> stop performer opening a window on all the 'other' essentially unused pipes?
[These I don't know.]
> Other questions:
> What is a software compositor? (see example perfly C code
> pfCompositorMode(compositor, PFCOMP_SOFTWARE, 1); )
> What are the PFCOMP_TYPEs PFCOMP_NxM_VERT and PFCOMP_NxM_HORIZ ? again,
> used in perfly code, but not in man page.
These have to do with a "software" compositing mode, something folks have
called "Monster" mode in the past. All pipes are used offline to compose the
scene and these are stitched together on pipe 0. Works well to scale
performance on scenes that have a _very_ heavy load. It's not something
you'd use (at least not likely) with a hardware compositor.
> What does pfCompositorAddCompositor do? It's mentioned in the
> man page, but there's no description.
That's a placeholder for cascading compositors into one another (eg
16->4->1). Not supported yet.
I've noted your other problems - I think(?) you're already in contact with
SGI support -- we'll pursue the issues with them offline (if you're not in
contact with them let me know).
Allan
-- Allan Schaffer allan++at++sgi.com Engr. Dept. Manager, Visual Systems Group 1-650-933-2160 Silicon Graphics http://www.sgi.com
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