2.0

This release was historically part of the Sun Shared Visualization v1.0 product.

Significant changes relative to 2.0 beta3:

1. Included libturbojpeg.dylib in Mac package (so that installing the TurboJPEG package is no longer necessary unless you want to rebuild VGL from source.)

2. Included TCBench and NetTest in the Mac package.

3. Added an internal gamma correction system. This was a last-minute feature addition to address the fact that there was no way to gamma-correct applications that were remotely displayed to non-SPARC clients. SPARC users are accustomed to OpenGL applications being gamma-corrected by default, so VirtualGL now mimics this behavior whenever it is running on a SPARC server, even if the client machine is not a SPARC machine.

   The behavior of the VGL_GAMMA environment variable has changed as follows:

   • VGL_GAMMA=1 (or vglrun +g):

     Enable gamma correction using the best available method. If displaying to a SPARC X server that has gamma-corrected visuals, try to use those gamma-corrected visuals. Otherwise, enable VGL's internal gamma correction system with a gamma correction factor of 2.22.

     This is the default when running applications on SPARC VirtualGL servers.

   • VGL_GAMMA=0 (or vglrun -g):

     Do not use gamma-corrected visuals (even if available on the X server), and do not use VGL's internal gamma correction system.

     This is the default when running applications on non-SPARC VirtualGL servers.

   • VGL_GAMMA={f} (or vglrun -gamma {f}):

     Do not use gamma-corrected visuals (even if available on the client), but enable VGL's internal gamma correction system with a gamma correction factor of {f}.

   Enabling the internal gamma correction system increases CPU usage by a few percent, but this has not been shown to affect the overall performance of VGL by a measurable amount.

   See the "VGL_GAMMA" entry in Chapter 18 of the User's Guide for more info.

4. Increased the size of the TurboJPEG compression holding buffer to account for rare cases in which compressing very-high-frequency image tiles (specifically parts of the 3D Studio MAX Viewperf test) with high quality levels (specifically Q99 or above) would produce JPEG images that are larger than the uncompressed input.

   Linux users will need to upgrade to TurboJPEG 1.04 (or later) to get this fix. For other platforms, the fix is included in the VGL 2.0 packages.

5. Minor documentation changes, including a change to the recommended OpenGL patches for SPARC VGL servers and an application recipe for SDRC I-DEAS Master Series.

6. Check for exceptions in the new operator to prevent VGL from dying ungracefully in out-of-memory situations.

7. Fixed a bug in the multi-threaded compression code whereby it would use too much memory to hold the image tiles for the second and subsequent compression threads. This led to memory exhaustion if the tile size was set to a low value (such as 16x16 or 32x32.)