Interactive Distributed Rendering of 3D Scenes on Multiple Xbox 360 Systems and Personal Computers

In interactive visualization environments which use a multiple screen setup, every output device has to be supplied frequently with video information. Such virtual environments often use large projection screens, which require high resolution video data. When increasing scene complexity, it can become a challenge to equip a single computer with graphics hardware powerful enough for the task. An efficient approach is to distribute the workload to multiple low-cost computer systems such as game consoles. Nowadays' game consoles are very powerful and specialized for interactive graphics applications, therefore they are suitable to being used for rendering purposes. A framework has been developed that builds on Microsoft's XNA Game Studio. It enables for interactive distributed rendering on multiple Xbox 360 systems and PCs. Tasks such as game logic synchronization, network session management are fully handled by the framework. A game built with it can focus mostly on its own implementation. The framework's structure follows that of the XNA Game Studio, which allows porting existing game projects quickly. Our evaluation showed that the framework is a lightweight solution which leaves almost the full CPU time to the actual game.