On 2010-06-03 19:23, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I am looking into doing a 10 screen installation using Pd/Gem. I'd like to run it on as few computers as possible. Anyone have any recommendations for Debian or Ubuntu setups that can have like many DVI ports in one computer?
the biggest thing i did with something like this was an 8 projector installation [1], using a single computer (running ubuntu; i would have preferred debian, but some software we had to license was only available for ubuntu)) with 2 "recent" nVidia cards (forgot which ones; it was done last year, so probably it was 2 GTX295 or similar); 3 heads where equipped with triplehead2go, which would have made for a total of 9 projectors, but we only needed 8; the remaining head was the control computer to do the patching.
there were 2 problems involved (and solved):
we ended up solving by forcing EDIDs)
depending on your hardware/driver combination, you get a maximum texture size. with the cards we used this texture size was 8192x8192. this size (both horizontal and vertical) is an upper boundary for hardware-accelerated window sizes. so you cannot do a line of 8 projectors in a row, each with a resolution of 1080p, as this would sum up to a window of (8*1920)x1080==15360x1920, and 15360 clearly being >8192. what you can do is to have your line of 8 screens form a virtual monitor of 4x2 screens, covered by a 7680x2160 window and use framebuffers for rendering the scene (this really only matters if there is continuation between the screens (e.g. in our project we actually had one huge 270° screen, which was fed by 8 projectors) if the screens are more or less independent, then it's way simpler)
fgmasdr IOhannes
[1] http://web.medienkunstlabor.at/projects/deskotheque/deskotheque-display-syst...