[vtkusers] VTK and multiple monitors.

[Gaetan Lehmann]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:13:05 +0100, David Gobbi <dgobbi at atamai.com> wrote:

> Kevin H. Hobbs wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 15:46 +1100, Andrew Maclean wrote:
>>
>>> Has anyone any experience running VTK with multiple monitors? Someone  
>>> here is thinking of having an embedded system driving four monitors
>>> each having a borderless render window and they want a vtk animation  
>>> to move
>>> from one monitor to another. Presumably the embedded system will  
>>> support 4
>>> graphics adapters or 4 multi-head cards.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance for any advice.
>>>
>>> Andrew
>>>
>>
>> I'm sure the OS and driver matters. I've been using Fedora Core with
>> Dual monitors for a while now. I use the radeon driver that comes with
>> x.org for my cheap and old  Radeon 7500.  Even with  MergedFB set no GL
>> application shows anything on the second monitor. This is not a problem
>> for me as I usually have at least one monitors worth of gvim windows.  
>> The person you are talking about may have to do some real testing or
>> research about the OS, hardware, and driver combination before getting
>> going.
>>
> I can give a little additional insight... SGI visualization systems  
> (Prism/Onyx)
> can handle this no problem, they're designed for fast multi-head  
> graphics,
> any recent nVidia dual-head cards will work too, under either WindowsXP
> or Linux with Xinerama (never tried a quad configuration), I've never  
> tried
> a Radeon but I suspect it would work for dual-head VTK on Windows.
>

I'm using a ATI card with dual head under linux without too much problem  
(The display sometime freeze). Before that, I was using a nvidia dual head  
monitor without any problem.
The rendering is done on the 2 display with the MergeFB option (ATI) or  
dualview IIRC (nvidia).
Rendering on several monitors with several cards might be more difficult

Gaetan


-- 
Gaëtan Lehmann
Biologie du Développement et de la Reproduction
INRA de Jouy-en-Josas (France)
tel: +33 1 34 65 29 66    fax: 01 34 65 29 09
http://voxel.jouy.inra.fr