I am trying to do OpenGL rendering using multiple gfx cards on Windows and need some help on this.
I have two gfx cards on my Windows system and I want my application to download & render some texture data on one graphics card and some other texture data on the other gfx card. I don’t want my texture data to be downloaded on both the gfx cards.
To do this (and correct me if I am wrong)my application needs to create two GL context with each GL context attached to one gfx card. Then I will render my one texture data using one GL context and other texture data using the other GL context and hopefully they will be downloaded and rendered on different gfx cards.
Now the question is, Is it at all possible on Windows to do something like this ? If yes then how can I write this kind of application on Windows ? I am not an expert on Windows and any help in this regard is welcome.
Yes, it is possible to download different texture data to different gfx cards. Assuming that you have atleast 2 displays each one connected to 1 gfx card. Create a GL window on each display and simply make the corresponding rendering context current and do whatever u want to do.
When u create a window, its location and span automatically determines, what gfx card it gets mapped to. There might be one but atleast I don’t know a way of specifying which Window belongs to what gfx card.
I have two monitors each connected to different gfx card with extended desktop spanning both the monitors.
>When u create a window, its location and span automatically determines, what gfx card it gets mapped to.
What happens when I move my GL Window from one gfx display (monitor) to other gfx display or when the GL window is overlapping both the displays ? What will happen to the GL contexts and downloaded texture data on the gfx card ?
OpenGL on Windows with multiple cards is highly dependant of the drivers used.
Hard to predict what will happen, as you don’t tell what are your cards ?
With 2 Nvidia cards, you have a good bet that it will work. I seem to recall there is a driver seting saying “optimize separately for each card” “optimize as if both cards had the same capabilities” or even “fallback to software”.