<div dir="ltr">hi all,<div><br></div><div>This is a status update on vtk on Raspberry pi, with hardware accelerated OpenGL.</div><div><br></div><div>After a few days of trial and error, I managed to get VTK working on Raspberry Pi 3. I hope my experience can save others some time, as information on the web can be misleading.</div><div><br></div><div>First of, I am using Raspberry Pi 3. The DOs and DONTs</div><div><br></div><div>DO:</div><div>- make sure you use the official PSU (rated at 2.5A), as there are reports that an under-powered PI causes OpenGL driver to fail,</div><div><br></div><div>DONTs:</div><div>- don't use the official 7" touch screen. The OpenGL driver apparently is very picky on the output format. It won't work with the 7" touch screen</div><div>- don't follow the instruction on <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-new-raspbian-release/">https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-new-raspbian-release/</a>, in particular DO NOT UPGRADE Raspbian.</div><div><br></div><div>Here is what I had to do to get hardware accelerated OpenGL to work:</div><div><br></div><div>- create a new raspbian/Jessie bootdisk using 2016-03-18 image</div><div>- upon first boot, which boots into X by default, expand the file system using Menu->Preference->Raspberry Pi Configuration. Reboot</div><div>- upon 2nd boot, change keyboard/time-zone as desired. Using the same configuration utility as the previous step, change the boot option to "To CLI" instead of "To Desktop". Reboot.</div><div>- now raspbian will boot into commandline instead of X. Issue the following command:</div><div> sudo raspi-config</div><div> - under Advanced Options, Enable OpenGL driver, reboot</div><div>- once rebooted, issue "startx" </div><div>- open a terminal, issue the following command</div><div> sudo apt-get update</div><div> sudo apt-get install libvtk5-qt4-dev cmake cmake-curses-gui mesa-utils</div><div><br></div><div>I choose vtk5 but vtk6 is also available as a pre-compiled package.</div><div><br></div><div>- with mesa-utils installed, you can run glxgears to test opengl. I am getting 59FPS on RPi3</div><div><br></div><div><div>pi@raspberrypi:~/research/bin/vtkViewPolyDataMesh $ glxgears </div><div>Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be</div><div>approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.</div><div>293 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.548 FPS</div><div>301 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.994 FPS</div><div>299 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.613 FPS</div><div>290 frames in 5.0 seconds = 57.999 FPS</div><div>300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.807 FPS</div><div>300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.995 FPS</div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>- I have compiled my own VTK program that displays a vtkpolydata and it runs well. I'll be making a video and post it online in a few days.</div><div><br></div><div>Again, please not that while I "updated" the apt packages, I NEVER "upgraded" any. I needed to "update" in order to install additional programs, but an "upgrade" will brake the OpenGL driver.</div><div><br></div><div>Hope this helps</div><div><br></div><div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">--</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">Elvis C.S. Chen, PhD</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif"> </font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">Imaging, Robarts Research Institute</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">Biomedical Engineering</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">Medical Biophysics, Western University</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><font face="Calibri,sans-serif" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">London, Ontario, Canada</font></span></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:'Segoe UI','Segoe WP','Segoe UI WPC',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:15px;margin:0px"><br></div></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 8:36 PM, David Gobbi <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.gobbi@gmail.com" target="_blank">david.gobbi@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Hi Elvis,<div><br></div><div>One way of checking the OpenGL driver is the "glxinfo" command.</div><div>The "OpenGL renderer" is usually Mesa if it is a software renderer,</div><div>but if it gives the name of a specific card or chip, then you probably</div><div>have hardware rendering, e.g. here's what my laptop reports:<br><div><br></div><div><div>OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation</div><div>OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M OpenGL Engine</div><div>OpenGL version string: 2.1 NVIDIA-8.24.17 310.90.9.05f01</div><div>OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">I don't know much about the Raspberry Pi, but google found this</div><div class="gmail_extra">page that describes how to enable hardware OpenGL:</div><div class="gmail_extra"><a href="https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-new-raspbian-release/" target="_blank">https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-new-raspbian-release/</a><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"> - David</div></font></span><div><div class="h5"><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 6:06 PM, Elvis Chen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:elvis.chen@gmail.com" target="_blank">elvis.chen@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>Greetings,<br><br></div>I've recently acquired a Raspberry Pi 3. To my surprise, the latest raspbian (Jessie) comes with a complete development environment, including gcc (4.9), cmake, and vtk (both vtk5 and vtk6).<br><br></div>I wrote a small program that reads a polydata and display it as a test bed. The pipeline is:<br><br></div>vtkpolydatareader->vtkpolydatamapper->vtkactor<br><br></div>nothing fancy.<br><br></div>However, the rendering is surprisingly SLOW. It looks if the graphics is not hardware accelerated.<br><br></div>My questions are:<br><br></div>1) How do I check if the video (which I assume to be OpenGL) is hardware accelerated?<br></div>2) any suggestion on how to optimize the performance?<br><br></div>My next step is to comple vtk myself to see if it makes any difference.<br><br></div>any help is very much appreciated,</div></blockquote></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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