[vtkusers] hardware accelerated offscreen rendering without diplaying window

[Peter Schiemann]

Hello Victor,
with VTK you only have the choice of either accelerated rendering on a physical display or software rendering which can be off screen. There has been no attempt to support pure off screen with hardware support for several years. As you say, the best alternative is Visit. What you need works out of the box.
If you need a solution in VTK, study the class vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow.cxx and find out why it pops up an unnecessary window although set to offscreen. I was told it is not difficult, but I am not familiar with X windows programming.

Good luck!
Peter


>Dear VTK gurus!
>
>I was wondering about the status of hardware accelerated offscreen rendering in VTK *without* displaying an X window on the server (linux operating systems).
>
>If this is possible, can somebody please document the CMake settings and a usage example in the VTK Wiki?
>
>There have been several discussion threads on this issue, but I found no solution. They all gave up at some point. I guess http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Examples
>/Cxx/Utilities/OffScreenRendering is the "official" example, how to render offscreen. But unless compiled with software rendering, it still displays an X window.
>
>If this is impossible with VTK, why?? VisIt is capable of hidden, accelerated offscreen rendering. SoQt can easily do it, too.
>Is VTK designed differently, so that use of modern pbuffers or frame buffer objects is excluded? Then please say so, and people can make their choice.
>
>Thank you
>Vic

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