Fast multi-window rendering

Question

I\'ve been searching and testing different kinds of rendering libraries for C# days for many weeks now. So far I haven\'t found a single library that works well on multi-windowe

Answer 1

We have a similar problem (need to render 3D views on 9+ monitors using 3+ graphics cards). We opted to use raw DirectX11 after finding that 3rd party rendering libraries are all very poor at multiple windows across multiple monitors, let alone with multiple adapters too. (It seems most engines are designed for a fullscreen game, and tend to suck at windowed views). Rather than using a 3rd party layer like SlimDX or SharpDX, we decided in the end to write the core renderer directly in C++ and just expose the simple API that our application needs via C++/CLI - this should maximise performance and minimise maintainability issues (relying on 3rd party vendor for bug fixes etc).

However, just like you, we found in testing that if we rendered 9 views from a single process (each rendered on its own thread), we got terrible performance (very low frame rates). However, if we ran 9 separate processes (one per view/monitor), the performance was as expected (excellent).

So having spent days trawling the net fruitlessly for a better solution, we opted for simply running our renderers in separate processes. Not entirely a bad solution for us as our renderers need to support distribution over multiple PCs anyway, so it just means we'll use this facility permanently instead of only when required.

(I don't know if this is helpful to you as an answer, but we'd also be very keen to know if there are any other solutions out there that work across multiple graphics cards, in case we're missing a better trick)