Distributed Rendering Object Network (DRONE)

The available rendering performance on current computers increases constantly, primarily by employing parallel algorithms using the newest many-core hardware, as for example multi-core CPUs or GPUs. This development enables faster rasterization, as well as conspicuously faster software-based real-time ray tracing. Despite the tremendous progress in rendering power, there are and always will be applications that require distributed configurations employing several machines for rendering and display.

DRONE is a powerful and flexible rendering framework, which is highly modular, and can be easily reconfigured (even at runtime) to meet the ever-changing demands of applications built on top of it. At the same time, the flexibility of the DRONE approach comes at a negligible cost in comparison to specialized and highly-optimized implementations of distributed rendering.

• Alexander Löffler