Design and implementation of a large-scale hybrid distributed graphics system

Abstract

Although modern graphics hardware has strong capability to render millions of triangles within a second, huge scenes are still unable to be rendered in real-time. Lots of parallel and distributed graphics systems are explored to solve this problem. However none of them is built for large-scale graphics applications.We designed AnyGL, a large-scale hybrid distributed graphics system, which consists of four types of logical nodes, Geometry Distributing Node, Geometry Rendering Node, Image Composition Node and Display Node. The first two types of logical nodes are combined to be a sort-first graphics architecture while the others compose images. A new state tracking method based on logical timestamp is also pro-posed for state tracking of large-scale distributed graphics systems. Besides, three classes of compression are employed to reduce the requirement of network bandwidth, including command code compression, geometry compression and image compression. A new extension, global share of textures and display lists, is also implemented in AnyGL to avoid memory explosion in large-scale cluster rendering systems.