Clustering for games

[GNUtoo]

Is there any clustering progrrams that use open gl and graphic card that are suitable for games?
(and if so is it aplicalble only to open source games as nexuiz or also to others)

[HPRichard]

What exactly do you want to do with clustering?
Do you want to use multiple machines for graphics output for being able to use some more screens than you can use with one computer? (A kind of SuperTiling across multiple Machines like ATI with their CrossFire solution)
Do you want to use multiple Computers because the computing burden for the game is too high for a single machine?
Do you want some machines to do precomputations on theie GPUs for the GPU of the output machine not having to do that much, as done here http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/switch/
or what is your goal of "clustering"?

Clustering can only work if you can parallelize the work to be done with not-that-much communication between the different computation tasks. One possibility could be to offload the physics calculations to another machine with an idling physics processor like this one http://www.ageia.com/ or with an idling GPU if someone wrote GPU code for that calculations. For using other/multiple GPUs you may also want lo look at http://www.gpgpu.org/ where you can get an Idea what you can do with a second GPU not occupied with drawing monsters.

So the question remains: What kind of clustering do you think of?

[lifeform]

i'm playing some games using cedega.
the refresh rate n response seems slightly sluggish as compared to a pure windows environment.
was thinking of clustering to improve the performance.

what kinda clustering shld i b looking at?

[Jeremy_Z]

[HPRichard]

Clustering for making an existing Windows game run faster is near to impossible. Most Windows games do not make use of more than one CPU (with the exception of Quake 3, which got a slight improvement from a second CPU). So clustering is not benefical as the work cannot be distributed among several machines. The only theoretical benefit could be that you have a faster machine/CPU in your cluster and thet by chance the process of the game is moved over to that particular CPU. At that point you would do better playing on that machine (if it has a halfway decent graphics card) as all the 3D-API calls have to make the way from that CPU to your graphics card, which has lots of overhead and is probably slower than playing on your own machine.
Clustering can only be benefical if you have the possibility to prallelize your problem, for example when using a software renderer, wherer the game can run on one machine, and the software renderer on the other one, but only if the architecture of the rendering API allows this.

The game is completely different if you develop a new game and have the nerves of writing massively parallelized code, that is a case where clustering comes to being useful.

[Redhatter]

To steal a post on another forum...

[Jeremy_Z]

Well, distributed rendering works well for realtime 3D, but it needs every machine to be able to render (not 133 with 10 years old video card), and does require support in the code (and/or hardware support).
_________________
"Because two groups of consumers drive the absolute high end of home computing: the gamers and the porn surfers." /.
My gentoo projects, Kelogviewer and a QT4 gui for etc-proposals

[tHe_IkkE]

The only "real" use for multiple computers and gaming I can think of is running a multiplayer game and then let other computers connect to "simulate" another player so the AI of your bots can be balanced.
You'd have to write your own bot i think....

[brendaniabbatis]

[Redhatter]

[nokesc]

Check this out ...

http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2005/volume09issue02/art01_ray_tracing/p01_abstract.htm

Along with multiple core cpu's, clusters could take advantage of games based on ray tracing rather than polygons ... games like wolfenstien and Doom used a similar technique called ray casting and heightmapping. With the much faster speeds of today's processors this could be taken a step further ... imagining a game running @ 640x480 using ray tracing, awesome eye candy!

[renrutal]