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Preliminaries
Published in Wong Gabriyel, Wang Jianliang, Real-Time Rendering: Computer Graphics with Control Engineering, 2017
In real-time computer graphics, 3D rendering refers to the process of generating a sequence of images that produces not just the animated effect of motion and change but the visual cue of depth for objects in the imagery given an external input or stimulus to the system. In typical applications, the goal is to provide visual feedback to the user when there is interaction via the human-computer interface. The speed at which each image, known as a frame, of the animation sequence is generated defines the performance of the system.
Infrastructure as a Service
Published in Curtis Franklin, Brian J. S. Chee, Securing the Cloud, 2019
Curtis Franklin, Brian J. S. Chee
The other emerging technology that doesn’t even have a recognized name yet is what we’re calling “Workstation as a Service” (WaaS), where the virtualized workstation has access to some sort of graphics co-processor. Here the intent is to share an expensive graphics processing unit (GPU) (some now priced at many thousands of US dollars each) for hardware supported 3D rendering. Typical uses aren’t for gaming but rather 3D CAD (i.e., AutoDesk® Revit®, Maya®, Renderman®, etc.) or scientific simulations such as BLAST® (genetics), MATLAB®, Mathematica®, etc. So although Microsoft’s Server 2012 R2 now provides software-simulated GPUs, only hardware GPUs are viable for many science and engineering applications. The two major categories of shared GPUs are: GPU Passthrough: This is where the entire GPU is dedicated to the virtual workstation for each shared time slice. So even if your workstation only needs a little bit of GPU to handle something as simple as “Aero Glass” in Windows® 8, it would get the entire GPU for its time slice. This setup (at the time of writing and is likely to change by the time this books is being sold) is typical of the VMware- and Citrix®-shared GPU solutions and only works for a small number of certified GPU boards. Even though Citrix virtual desktops (XenDesktop® and XenApp®) are supported with VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V® as a foundation, the shared GPU environment is ONLY available for Citrix XenServer®.Shared GPU: Think of this like a game of Tetris®, where varying size blocks fit together to fill the volume of the system. In this case, as you provision your virtual workstations, you set a maximum number of monitors, monitor resolution, and color depth. This determines just how much video resources need to be pre-allocated to each virtual workstation. The Microsoft RemoteFX® system will then fit these requirements into the available GPU resources and service as many virtual workstations as possible with the available resources. So in the case of the Aero Glass interface, it might assign very little video RAM, whereas a user running AutoDesk 3D AutoCAD® would be assigned more. (Note: When we started writing this book, Citrix ONLY handled GPU passthrough, but early in 2014 they began offering a shared GPU solution similar to Microsoft’s RemoteFX setup)
Virtual forests: a review on emerging questions in the use and application of 3D data in forestry
Published in International Journal of Forest Engineering, 2023
Arnadi Murtiyoso, Stefan Holm, Henri Riihimäki, Anna Krucher, Holger Griess, Verena Christiane Griess, Janine Schweier
The visualization of 3D data is naturally conducted using digital screens, which are currently the most common conduit for digital data (Klippel et al. 2019). The earliest example of 3D data rendering using computers and a 2D screen display is the Sketchpad software (Sutherland 1964), which can be used to draw simple 3D primitives. In modern 3D rendering, the graphics processing unit (GPU) plays an important role. By using a dedicated GPU instead of a computer’s processor or central processing unit (CPU), the amount of rendered data can be increased significantly and rendering can be completed much faster (Palha et al. 2017). Two modern rendering engines are OpenGL (Johansson et al. 2015) and DirectX (Baek and Yoo 2020). Operations within the 3D space also require interaction with the GPU, with the two most common interfaces being NVIDIA’s CUDA and the open standard OpenCL (Ghorpade et al. 2012).