distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth back
(L) [2007/10/04] [HalfEmpty] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!I'm currently writing a distributed real-time ray-tracer, and my program currently performs better when it's running on only one machine because of the overhead of transferring portions of the image over the network (on a 100 mbps LAN). Even if I use UDP sockets (at the moment i'm using TCP which I will change to UDP soon) I don't think the improvement in transfer rate will be enough. So my question is, do distributed real-time ray-tracers generally use some type of compression on the data they transfer over the network?
(L) [2007/10/04] [toxie] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!yes. (zlib is an option or transferring the final picture elements as jpg)
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The box. You opened it. We came.
(L) [2007/10/05] [moogie] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!I would imagine that you would reduce the bandwith considerably by sending image deltas as per frame the image should not change dramatically. perhaps a somthing as quick and easy as an XOR for each colour channel combined with a RLE compressor will reduce the bandwith and have negligable cost.
(L) [2007/10/06] [Zakalwe] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!I know iRT, the Cell Ray tracer IBM released, uses JPEG compression, reducing the required bandwidth to ~200Mb/s
(L) [2007/10/12] [TomPie] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!Even better: use gigabit ethernet. [SMILEY Wink]
It´s cheap.
Tom
(L) [2007/10/15] [hanatos] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!we use libavcodec and an mpeg stream on a 100MBit link
(L) [2007/10/25] [TomPie] [distributed ray-tracing and bandwidth] Wayback!Have look [LINK http://cg.inf.fh-bonn-rhein-sieg.de/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/vrcai2004hinkenjannbues-cameraready.pdf here].
The ideas presented should be applicable to ray tracing.
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