From: Endre M. Lidal (endre++at++cmr.no)
Date: 12/13/2005 04:21:23
Dear all.
There has been some discussion on how to setup SGI Prism and multipipe
on this list, but I have not found any recommendations for PC-linux.
We have a PC with two nVidia Quadro 4500 graphics cards, and using the
latest nVidia linux driver (1.0-8174). Our display is a 2 projector
(wide) TAN Powerwall in _active_ stereo and we connect one gfx-card to
each projector. The way I see it, there are different way to set up X
and Performer on these hardware configurations:
1. It is possible to set up X to be aware of both gfx-cards (as a 2 pipe
system.) In this configuration we have pipe 0:0 on the left projector
and 0:1 on the right projector. It is not possible to drag a window from
the left side to the right side. I believe this mode is equal to the
setup of SGI Prism with two pipes, right?
If we start Performer in multipipe-mode (like for example 'perfly -M1')
we get image on both projectors (menu only on the left side) and two
DRAW processes. But the right side seems to be rendered in software b/c
we only get 1-2 frames pr second. Anyone knows why?
2. If we instead enables Xinerama in the nVidia driver we hide the two
pipes and X only sees one pipe for the whole wall. If we run performer
now we get hardware accelerated rendering, and, as expected, one DRAW
process. I imagine Xinerama has a little performance overhead.
My question is then which of the configurations is the recommended
(assuming we can get hardware acceleration to work in 2 pipe mode (point
1 above)? What are other people using?
Sincerely,
Endre M. Lidal
-- Endre M. Lidal (endre++at++cmr.no) \ direct ++47 5557 4204 Scientist, Advanced Computing \ cell: ++47 9510 8899 Christian Michelsen Research AS (www.cmr.no)
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