Because rendering has many opportunities for exploiting parallelism, considerable work has been done distributing rendering across a network of computers for better performance. Typically the rendering algorithms used are based on radiosity or ray tracing [8] and suited to general purpose processors instead of accelerated 3D graphics hardware. OpenGL was the rendering interface used by DECS/OpenGL [5], but the prototype was to demonstrate generic distributed computing with OpenGL rendering as a vehicle, not to build a production OpenGL implementation suitable for use as a render service.
In contrast to GLR's approach of exporting a network-extensible service for accessing and amortizing the cost of high-performance 3D graphics hardware, distributed rendering creates such a rendering resource from a network of general purpose processors. While distributed rendering may be suited for relatively slow-to-render and computationally expensive scenes generated using raytracing and radiosity techniques, GLR will likely offer superior performance when interactive rendering techniques suffice.