CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++openglframebuffer
lagarkane
lagarkane

Reputation: 1005

Copy or move a FrameBufferObject

I want to find a way to send all the geometry from an opengl framebuffer to a remote computer, who would do the rendering. This would allow me to have very complex simulations running on some kind of a big supercomputer, and rendered on a small mobile or simply cheap client machine doing the rendering.

Before starting digging in my code, I though it would be relatively easy: let's copy the vertex arrays and send it through the network, using boost::serialisation for example, and that's it. But my geometry are encapsulated, which prevents me from accessing it from where I want to.

I have been able to render into a framebuffer instead of rendering directly on screen though, and I was wondering if there is a way to retrieve data from OpenGL's fbo's in anyway?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 48

Answers (1)

datenwolf
datenwolf

Reputation: 162327

First your terminology is wrong. Frame Buffer Objects are encapsulations of off-screen images/surfaces and don't hold geometry.

Second: What you imagine has been implemented already by the VirtualGL project (however it's stuck at a rather old OpenGL profile and doesn't support modern GPUs).

Also X11/GLX always supported indirect OpenGL operation, i.e. a remote machine would send OpenGL commands to the local display server, which is exactly what you probably think of. But this has a major drawback: Network bandwidth becomes the major bottleneck.

Upvotes: 1

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