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 1.8 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 1.8 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 1.8 contains the following features, enhancements, bug fixes and documentation changes over the Equalizer 1.7 release:

New Features

Implemented Qt window system for onscreen windows. Issue 21 partially done.
DisplayCluster streaming can be enabled with automatic configuration using new global view attributes: EQ_VIEW_SATTR_DISPLAYCLUSTER and EQ_VIEW_SATTR_PIXELSTREAM_NAME.

Enhancements

New EqGLLibraries.cmake script for simpler OpenGL configuration in downstream projects
Compression is enabled for DisplayCluster streaming
DisplayCluster streaming is now asynchronous
The application now doesn't abort if the init fails
Enable FBO rendering using QGLWidget

Optimizations

DisplayCluster streaming is optimized: no alpha, and reuse FBO texture if available

Examples

A DisplayCluster example config was added

Documentation

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

Improved init documentation

Bug Fixes

Equalizer 1.8 includes various bugfixes over the 1.7 release, including the following:

281: Pan in Sequel with the right button as in eqPly
304: Configs with no running channels should exit or fail
368: Fix mixup of horizontal and vertical wheel events
370: VRPN head tracking changes not visible when idle
Universal AGL build is now fixed
Fix crash while streaming to non-running DisplayCluster application
Fix crash in eqPly render clients with Qt

Known Bugs

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

17: AGL: Window close does not work
18: zoom: depth readback does not work
19: zoom readback with FBO
77: 7-window.DB.PIXEL.eqc broken
78: AGL: assertion on interaction with multiple GPUs
167: HWLOC: Segmentation Fault with empty auto thread affinity mask
226: Crash with layout switch on multi GPU system
232: ROI with monitor equalizer results in wrong compositing
286: Certain combinations of 2D and subpixels compounds don't work in eqPly
298: RDMA connection to server from rendering client crashes

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 1.8:

Linux: Ubuntu 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.

Table of Contents