Jez86

24th March 2006 14:57 UTC

Distributed AVS Rendering
Hi All,

I have a dual-head graphics card and enjoy great wide screen visualisations. However a large majority of people are more likely to have two computers rather than a dual-head graphics card.

I think a great idea would be if two (or more) computers could connect via a LAN and share the variables within AVS and then render a segment of the total render area to display on each individual monitor.

For example two computers are running at a screen resolution of 1024*768. The total render area is 2048*768 (such with dual-head configurations) each computer renders its own 1024*768 segment. And presumably if the principle works it could be expanded for more interesting screen configurations for more than two PCs and monitors, or two PCs both running dual-head cards).

Presumably the PC playing the music (or recieving line-in) would act as some sort of server, and other winamp's could connect to it through use of a plugin, which could add the extra display resoloution options to AVS or any other visualistion plugin.

Just some food for thought.

Regards,

Jes.

PAK-9

24th March 2006 17:53 UTC

<double post>

PAK-9

24th March 2006 17:54 UTC

Its not as simple as that unfortunately, you would need to recode AVS to be distributed which is extremely non-trivial. Even if it were you would encounter an enormous drag factor of having the processing seperated by ethernet (which is extremely slow by PC internals standards). Even with multiple cores or dual CPU system there is some overhead with interprocess communication, slowing the link between processors only exacerbates the problem.