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Epic Games Contributes New SDL Video Driver For Offscreen Rendering

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 24 September 2019 at 07:50 PM EDT. 28 Comments

Epic Games' Brandon Schaefer (and in fact former Canonical developer working on Ubuntu's Mir display server) has contributed a new SDL2 video driver back-end for offscreen rendering.

This offscreen video driver for SDL2 is intended for headless rendering and for letting multiple GPUs be used for headless rendering via EGL.

The target is disabled by default for now but allows for offscreen rendering with EGL+OpenGL/GLES and frame-buffers. It's interesting Epic Games is contributing the code and can be used for various offscreen rendering use-cases whether it be cloud gaming or other purposes. It will be interesting to see ultimately their motives for this new video driver.

The driver landed in the latest SDL2 development code a short time ago.

28 Comments

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.