RE: Use remote graphical program

["Phil Betts" <Phil dot Betts at ascribe dot com>]

Gustavo Seabra wrote on Thursday, January 03, 2008 3:16 PM::

> On Jan 3, 2008 7:08 AM, Phil Betts <Phil.Betts@dont_feed_spammers.com>
wrote:
                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PCYMTNQREAIYR

>> There is an experimental, but (in my experience) very stable, version
>> of XWin with GLX support.  This is in package xorg-x11-xwin-gl and
>> installs the executable XWin_GL.exe.  You would need to alter your
>> startxwin.sh to run this instead of XWin.exe.  It works, just don't
>> expect great performance. 
>> 
>> Phil
> 
> That's interesting... Last time I checked, there was no maintainer for
> X in Cygwin, but I do admit that was some time ago. So, I'm very
> curious to learn about this newer XWin version. If you don't mind, I'd
> like to ask a couple of questions:
> 
> 1. Is this package available through setup.exe? Or do we need to
> recompile it for Cygwin ourselves?
> 
> 2. What do you mean by "don't expect great performance."? Is it a GLX
> issue or something related to this particular version of XWin, as
> compared to the older ones?
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> Gustavo.

Sorry for the delay in replying.  I thought I'd sent it thanks to 
Outlook telling me I had, when in fact it had only saved it in my 
drafts folder!

This isn't new, it was experimental at the time Xwin last had a
maintainer and just never got promoted to stable.

It's available through setup.exe, but I guess you have to tick the 
"exp" radio button at the top to see it (once it's installed, it 
appears without selecting exp).

In terms of performance, GL software is really designed for running 
on the local host, so you're never going to get blazing performance
running clients on a remote host.  The network overhead slows it 
down considerably.  However, XWin's GLX is not particularly fast, 
even when running locally.  Running glxgears.exe at the default size,
on XWin running on my laptop, I get (approximately):

62 fps running locally
31 fps running on a linux box without using ssh forwarding
21 fps running on a linux box via ssh forwarding without compression.
47 fps running on a linux box via ssh forwarding with compression.

None of these are stunning (IIRC, I get several hundreds of fps on a
linux box at home), but it may be adequate for your purposes.

My experience is that native GL applications running on Windows (e.g.
Blender3D) run noticeably faster when running full screen (if they can),
because there is no contention with DirectX.  I haven't tested it, 
but if performance is a problem, it may be worth trying XWin 
full screen before giving up on it.

I haven't looked at the code, but the locally run glxgears runs at 
100% cpu on my laptop, which suggests that much of the GL code is 
handled in software, rather than hardware accelerated.  The remote 
tests all run at about 92% cpu, so the network is (just) the 
limiting factor.

Phil

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