There is one possibility that MAY work. I cetainly dont guarentee it. I used to work extensivesly selling and assembling hardware and developing software for 3d stereoscopic VR systems up till about 1 year ago, so some of what i say may be out of date.
It is quite correct to say that of the NVIDIA cards the only ones that support Quadbuffer stereo are the proffesiional range QUADRO FX workstation cards. These are workstation cards aimed at the proffesional user and as a example a Quadro FX 4500 would set you back $AUS 4500.00 With one of these cards you can use software written for quadbuffer software and the nvidia drivers even have options to output in different stereo formats to different stereo display devices, so they are very flexiable and desirable cards if you can afford them. Dont mistake the cheap crap quadro multiscreen range for this, the ones needed are QUADRO FX and can be identified by having on the back of the card a THREE (3) pin round connector for the lcd shutter glasses to connect. This is very important. Every second day i would have someone ring up and say "ive got a card with this connector but my glasses dont work" Of course what they had was a Geforce with a 4 FOUR pin SVHS connector, but do you think i could convince them of this ? The standard Geforce gaming cards DO NOT SUPPORT QUAD BUFFER STEREO, they never have and they never will. All 3D stereo/glasses accessories/drivers that produce 3d stereo on a Geforce card are hacks by Nvidia that interupt the opengl/directx rendering, and attempt to introduce 3d stereo by overriding the game renderding and producing an left right image. How well this works depends on the Game, and how the game is put together, and can vary a lot. So you can see this teqchnique does not rely on your software supporting stereo, it tries to add stereo to exisitng games. Another limitation of this is it only works full screen without window borders. Opengl quadbuffer stereo can work in windows on the desktop, you can have a stereo display inside a window with the rest of the desktop looking normal or you can have it full screen. The whole opengl quadbuffer thing goes right back to the orignal opengl development on SGI machines from years ago, and has been part of opengl ever since. As far as im aware the only directx stereo options are 3rd party hacks and i would never ever use them for a proffesional display. Also i think the stereo sync singal for the glasses that comes out of the 3 pin connector on the quadro is leached of the sync signal from the Analogue VGA port of the grpahics card So if you have a regular Geforce card, and you have lcd shutter glasses that connect and get a signal from the VGA port (there are several manufacturers that produce such glasses readily availbale) and you are using XP you can try a program called Rivatuner from Guru3d.com. I did this about 1.5 years ago and it worked ok, but i certainly dont guarentee any results for anyone. When you install rivatuner you can install a driver to change the PCIID of the graphics card to make it think it is a quadro FX, and as a result have the quadro FX driver features including the quadbuffer stereo capability. You can then run quad buffer stereo software on your geforce that is now thinking it is a QuadroFX. Your VGA attached glasses should work, once you run you stereo application. This worked for me about 1.5 years ago, if there have been software or hadrware changes that prevent this from functioning then you are on your own. You wont get Quadro performance out of your geforce doing this, and the "consumer stereo" feature for games previosuly avaialbel will not work either. Peted _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
