Introduction

Welcome to Equalizer, the standard middleware to create and deploy parallel, scalable OpenGL applications. This release introduces major new features, most notably integrated head tracking using VRPN or OpenCV.

Equalizer 1.7 is a feature release extending the 1.0 API, distilling over several years of development and decades of experience into a feature-rich, high-performance and mature parallel rendering framework. It is intended for all application developers creating parallel, interactive OpenGL applications. Equalizer 1.7 can be retrieved by downloading the source code or one of the precompiled packages.

Features

Equalizer provides the following major features to facilitate the development and deployment of scalable OpenGL applications. A detailed feature list can be found on the Equalizer website.

• Runtime Configurability: An Equalizer application is configured automatically or manually at runtime and can be deployed on laptops, multi-GPU workstations and large-scale visualization clusters without recompilation.
• Runtime Scalability: An Equalizer application can benefit from multiple graphics cards, processors and computers to scale rendering performance, visual quality and display size.
• Distributed Execution: Equalizer applications can be written to support cluster-based execution. Equalizer uses the Collage network library, a cross-platform C++ library for building heterogenous, distributed applications.
• Support for Stereo and Immersive Environments: Equalizer supports stereo rendering head tracking, head-mounted displays and other advanced features for immersive Virtual Reality installations.

New in this release

Equalizer 1.7 contains the following features, enhancements, bug fixes and documentation changes over the Equalizer 1.6 release:

New Features

• 267: Flag to write the framebuffer content of destination channels to an image
• 280: Sequel: allow changing of near and far planes

Enhancements

• 272: Generic triply library for PLY model parsing and rendering
• 289: Install pdb files for windows examples in debug builds
• 299: Allow autoconfig setting of window size in pixels from environment variables
• 328: Remove Channel::getInput/OutputFrames
• 331: Added Config::syncObject

Optimizations

• No optimizations

Examples

• eqPly: removed serial Flock of Birds tracker support, superseeded by OpenCV and VRPN tracking support

Documentation

The following documentation has been added or substantially improved since the last release:

• Full documentation for the public Equalizer API
• Expanded content in the Equalizer Programming and User Guide

Bug Fixes

Equalizer 1.7 includes various bugfixes over the 1.6 release, including the following:

• 291: Document non-stack usage by protecting dtors
• 292: FMAX/FMIN error on VS2013
• 302: Not clamping window size hints to physical display if offscreen.
• 323: Reliability improvements in image transmission
• 324: Fix window creation in eqPly through admin API

Known Bugs

The following bugs were known at release time. Please file a Bug Report if you find any other issue with this release.

• 232: ROI with monitor equalizer results in wrong compositing
• 226: Crash with layout switch on multi GPU system
• 167: HWLOC: Segmentation Fault with empty auto thread affinity mask
• 77: 7-window.DB.PIXEL.eqc broken
• 78: AGL: assertion on interaction with multiple GPUs
• 17: AGL: Window close does not work
• 19: zoom readback with FBO
• 18: zoom: depth readback does not work

About

Equalizer is a cross-platform framework, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system. Equalizer requires at least OpenGL 1.1, but uses newer OpenGL features when available. Equalizer uses CMake and Buildyard to create a platform-specific build environment. The following platforms and build environments are tested for version 1.7:

• Linux: Ubuntu 13.10, 14.04, RHEL 6.5 (Makefile, i386, x64)
• Windows: 7 (Visual Studio 2008, i386, x64)
• Mac OS X: 10.8 (Makefile, XCode, i386, x64)

The Equalizer Programming and User Guide covers the basics of Collage programming. The API documentation can be found on github.

As with any open source project, the available source code, in particular the shipped examples provide a reference for developing or porting applications.

Technical questions can be posted to the eq-dev Mailing List, or directly to info@.nosp@m.equa.nosp@m.lizer.nosp@m.grap.nosp@m.hics..nosp@m.com.

Commercial support, custom software development and porting services are available from Eyescale. Please contact info@eyescale.ch for further information.

Errata