Distributed Rendering for Scalable Displays

Abstract

We describe a novel distributed graphics system that allows an application to render to a large tiled display. Our system, called WireGL, uses a cluster of off-the-shelf PCs connected with a high-speed network. WireGL allows an unmodified existing application to achieve scalable output resolution on such a display. This paper presents an efficient sorting algorithm which minimizes the network traffic for a scalable display. We will demonstrate that for most applications, our system provides scalable output resolution with minimal performance impact.