I remember that the Geforce series are capable of doing stereo only under
the fullscreen OpenGL mode - which is only used in 3D games. This capability
is provided by the Nvidia video driver. Under this mode, the card takes the
3D model that the game software sends to it, and generates a stereo view of
the scence. The game itself doesn't even know that it is now sending a
stereo view. And the driver would not turn on the stereo if the display is
not in fullscreen OpenGL mode.
As for 3D modelling softwares such as COOT or UCSF Chimera, it seems that
they use a different mechanism to activate the stereo mode. According to my
earlier experience, geforce cards would not work for any of our 3D modelling
softwares. And to my impression, making only an area on the display(i.e., a
window, like the one in COOT) stereo is a special capability of the
"workstation" cards, including the Nvidia's Quadro FX and ATI's FireGL
series.
So I think there are two questions we need to figure out: (1) Can the
Geforce cards be used with COOT? (2) Can the Quadro FX cards drive the LCD
mentioned in the bundle to 120Hz? I remember there was some buffering
mechanism in LCDs which made them useless for stereo. But I do not know if
this is still true for the one in the bundle.
By the way, there are a lot of cheap Quadro FX cards on eBay. Recently I
found that one can get a FX 3400 with ~$100.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Francis E Reyes" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 6:20 PM
Subject: [ccp4bb] 3D 120hz LCD setups available
Since this was of discussion on this board a week or so ago, I figure it
has relevancy.
http://store.nvidia.com/DRHM/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayProductDetailsPage&SiteID=nvidia&Locale=en_US&Env=BASE&productID=111286400&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=store_Jan09#
GeForce 3D Vision Bundle 120HZ 22" LCD for $598 USD apparently.
It seems the time to get rid of these clunky CRTs is coming!.
Of course pending Coot and PyMOL support :)
FR
---------------------------------------------
Francis Reyes M.Sc.
215 UCB
University of Colorado at Boulder
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 67BA8D5D
8AE2 F2F4 90F7 9640 28BC 686F 78FD 6669 67BA 8D5D
