[vtkusers] hardware acceleratec OpenGL on Raspberry pi 3/Raspbian?

[Elvis Chen]

hi all,

This is a status update on vtk on Raspberry pi, with hardware accelerated
OpenGL.

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.

First of, I am using Raspberry Pi 3.  The DOs and DONTs

DO:
- 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,

DONTs:
- 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
- don't follow the instruction on
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-new-raspbian-release/, in
particular DO NOT UPGRADE Raspbian.

Here is what I had to do to get hardware accelerated OpenGL to work:

- create a new raspbian/Jessie bootdisk using 2016-03-18 image
- upon first boot, which boots into X by default, expand the file system
using Menu->Preference->Raspberry Pi Configuration. Reboot
- 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.
- now raspbian will boot into commandline instead of X. Issue the following
command:
     sudo raspi-config
     - under Advanced Options, Enable OpenGL driver, reboot
- once rebooted, issue "startx"
- open a terminal, issue the following command
     sudo apt-get update
     sudo apt-get install libvtk5-qt4-dev cmake cmake-curses-gui mesa-utils

I choose vtk5 but vtk6 is also available as a pre-compiled package.

- with mesa-utils installed, you can run glxgears to test opengl. I am
getting 59FPS on RPi3

pi at raspberrypi:~/research/bin/vtkViewPolyDataMesh $ glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
293 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.548 FPS
301 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.994 FPS
299 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.613 FPS
290 frames in 5.0 seconds = 57.999 FPS
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.807 FPS
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.995 FPS


- 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.

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.

Hope this helps

--
Elvis C.S. Chen, PhD

Imaging, Robarts Research Institute
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Medical Biophysics, Western University
London, Ontario, Canada



On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 8:36 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Elvis,
>
> One way of checking the OpenGL driver is the "glxinfo" command.
> The "OpenGL renderer" is usually Mesa if it is a software renderer,
> but if it gives the name of a specific card or chip, then you probably
> have hardware rendering, e.g. here's what my laptop reports:
>
> OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
> OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M OpenGL Engine
> OpenGL version string: 2.1 NVIDIA-8.24.17 310.90.9.05f01
> OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
>
> I don't know much about the Raspberry Pi, but google found this
> page that describes how to enable hardware OpenGL:
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-new-raspbian-release/
>
>  - David
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 6:06 PM, Elvis Chen <elvis.chen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> 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).
>>
>> I wrote a small program that reads a polydata and display it as a test
>> bed. The pipeline is:
>>
>> vtkpolydatareader->vtkpolydatamapper->vtkactor
>>
>> nothing fancy.
>>
>> However, the rendering is surprisingly SLOW. It looks if the graphics is
>> not hardware accelerated.
>>
>> My questions are:
>>
>> 1) How do I check if the video (which I assume to be OpenGL) is hardware
>> accelerated?
>> 2) any suggestion on how to optimize the performance?
>>
>> My next step is to comple vtk myself to see if it makes any difference.
>>
>> any help is very much appreciated,
>>
>
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