Configuring Applications For Visualization Centers; Additional Information - HP xw3400 User Manual

Configuring Applications for Visualization Centers

Many high-end applications can transparently take advantage of these new visualization center
setups. The applications are already built using standard OpenGL graphics, and the NVIDIA driver
takes care of properly splitting the OpenGL graphics commands across the graphics cards to effect a
single large screen space for the application to run in.
NOTE: In drivers previous to release 8756, limitations in the NVIDIA driver limited window width
and height to 4096 pixels. For example, if you have a display setup of 4 hp 23" flat panels, each
with 1920 pixels of horizontal resolution, then you will really only be able to use a window that
covers ½ the horizontal screen space. For this reason and to get synchronized stereo, HP highly
recommends using NVIDIA driver release 8756 and later for vizcenter installations.
Some applications, such as Halliburton Landmark's GeoProbe, were written to accommodate SGI
Onyx Multipipe capabilities for graphics. In GeoProbe's case, the GeoProbe developers have
enabled the multipipe graphics capability on the xw9300 and xw9400 Linux systems, thus allowing
GeoProbe to realize all pixels provided on all displays at maximal performance when rendering very
graphics intensive datasets. For Geoprobe to run in this mode, the X configuration must not use the
Xinerama option, (vizconfig sets this by default) but instead should have one screen assigned per
graphics port. This setup enables full performance on the multi-pipe applications. (Xinerama incurs a
performance penalty) Most applications that are not multi-pipe aware require that X windows be
setup in Xinerama mode to display large windows that span more than 2 displays.

Additional Information

See the documentation files in /opt/hp/graphics/nvidia for more details. Also look at the example
config files in /opt/hp/graphics/nvidia/example_configs for more concrete details. If setting up a
config that is different than the example config files demonstrate, use vizconfig to create a config file
to start with and modify it to get the additional features that you need (remember that any edits made
to config file will have to be made again once vizconfig is re-run).
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