How to create a offscreen rendering context

I have a Windows machine with Radeon HD 6450. JOGL programs work fine when I run them from the console, however when I use remote desktop to connect to the machine and run programs, I get stuck with the Microsoft GDI implementation.

I'd like to figure out how to create a offscreen renderer that uses the Radeon card to do the drawing, and then copies the frames over to the window for displaying in the remote desktop. The problem is that when running in remote desktop I can't find any way to create a context using the radeon card -- it's like it's not there.

I don't have this problem with JOCL btw, I can select the GPU for OpenCL stuff, but OpenGL doesn't offer a straighforward way of selecting the rendering backend, or even running in a headless mode from what I can tell.

Does anyone have experience with something like this, or any ideas on how to solve my problem? I would appreciate it.

On 01/23/2013 06:07 AM, yossarian [via jogamp] wrote:
> I have a Windows machine with Radeon HD 6450. JOGL programs work fine when I
> run them from the console, however when I use remote desktop to connect to the
> machine and run programs, I get stuck with the Microsoft GDI implementation.
>
Windows RDC sucks .. we use [turbo] VNC in client/user mode
to allow a hardware HDC and GL context,
whether its on- or offscreen .. doesn't matter.

~Sven

Thanks for the VNC idea, it works. Pure genius!

However I'm still wondering if it's possible to start JOGL in a headless mode such that it doesn't matter whether you're running in RDC or not. It seems like it should be possible since JOCL can do it... Is this some limitation of Microsoft's WGL implementation?