Re: [Update REQ 6943]: Comments on your Software

[tor at cs.brown.edu]

munzner at cs.stanford.edu wrote:
> > But maybe there is a compromise: X-Windows can run on Windows
> > machines. Perhaps there is a way to run GeomView remotely from a
> > generous Unix machine for viewing on Windows machines.
> 
> The problem with this approach is that the graphics will be extremely
> slow. Most X-Windows applications are quite responsive whether they're
> local or remote, but that's because the client and server are exchange
> a pretty small amount of information. In contrast, for an interactive
> 3D graphics application, the entire window full of pixels needs to be
> updated many times per second. That's a lot of bandwidth, so it's a
> major speed hit to run graphics apps remotely. We usually don't
> recommend it. 

There is one more option that might be somewhat useable.  Some
MS-Windows X servers support GLX (such as Hummingbird Exceed 3D),
so you can run the OpenGL version of geomview remotely and only
push around GLX protocl instead of rendered images.  Your host
machine will need to be commercial unix box, or a Linux/*BSD box
with GLX capable OpenGL libraries (http://glx.on.openprojects.net/).

-tor