Epic Games' nDisplay technology distributes real-time Unreal Engine rendering across multiple machines for large-scale immersive displays. Scalable Display Manager — available free on the Unreal Marketplace — provides the automatic warp and blend calibration layer that makes nDisplay installations seamless across domes, curved screens, and custom-geometry environments.
Real-time rendering at scale is one of the defining technical challenges of modern large-format display systems. Whether the application is a full-dome planetarium show, a military training simulator, an immersive film set, or a live event projection, the fundamental problem is the same: generating, distributing, and synchronizing high-resolution content across multiple rendering machines and display outputs — at frame rates high enough to maintain the illusion of continuous motion.
Unreal Engine's nDisplay technology was developed to address exactly this challenge. Described in an Epic Games technical article by Sevan Dalkian, nDisplay enables real-time content to be distributed across a network of synchronized machines, each rendering a portion of the total frame, with precise edge matching across sections — all at the same time.
The applications for large-scale real-time content span a broad range of industries:
Live events — Hip-hop performer Childish Gambino's collaboration with Weta Digital used a 5.4K × 5.4K image rendered across five frame-locked machines and 12 projectors to create a real-time fantasy world inside the world's largest inflatable dome. nDisplay handled the distribution and synchronization. "Using nDisplay to be able to distribute the real-time rendering, and keep the resolution and the frame rate where it needed to be for this project, was key," said Jeremy Thompson, Art Director at 2n Design.
Military training — The military and defense sector was among the first to embrace large-scale real-time content for immersive training. Dome projection allows trainees to remain immersed in a shared environment while maintaining situational awareness of their peers — critical for high-tempo operations training.
Immersive film production — In 2019, Epic joined Lux Machina, Magnopus, Profile Studios, Quixel, ARRI, and others to test virtual production setups with live LED walls driven by nDisplay, providing both environments and lighting for actors and reflections on props.
For installations using nDisplay across projectors — rather than LED panels — automatic calibration is essential. Multiple projectors covering a dome, curved screen, or custom-geometry surface require precise warp and edge blending to produce a seamless image. Without calibration, nDisplay's content distribution capability cannot be fully realized on projection-based systems.
To extend nDisplay functionality to projection environments, Scalable Display Technologies released Scalable Display Manager for Unreal — a free, watermarked version of its calibration tool available directly on the Unreal Marketplace. The free version allows developers and integrators to test and experiment with projecting real-time Unreal content on dual-screen configurations of various shapes and sizes using nDisplay. The fully featured version supports unlimited projectors and complete production deployments.
The combination of nDisplay for content distribution and Scalable for automatic warp and blend calibration creates a complete pipeline for real-time immersive display environments — from the rendering layer through to a precisely calibrated, seamlessly blended physical display.
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