VirtualGL

VirtualGL (VGL) is an open-source software package that redirects the 3D rendering commands from Unix and Linux OpenGL applications to 3D accelerator hardware in a dedicated server and sends the rendered output to a (thin) client located elsewhere on the network. On the server side, VirtualGL consists of a library that handles the redirection and a wrapper program that instructs applications to use this library. Clients can connect to the server either using a remote X11 connection or using an X11 proxy such as a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server. In case of an X11 connection some client-side VirtualGL software is also needed to receive the rendered graphics output separately from the X11 stream. In case of a VNC connection no specific client-side software is needed other than the VNC client itself.

==Problem== The performance of OpenGL applications can be greatly improved by rendering the graphics on dedicated hardware accelerators that are typically present in a GPU. GPUs have become so commonplace that applications have come to rely on them for acceptable performance. But VNC and other thin client environments for Unix and Linux do not have access to such hardware on the server side. Therefore they either do not support OpenGL applications at all or resort to slower methods such as rendering on the client or in software on the server.