VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 11:09:23 CST

On Sat, Jan 15, 2000 at 05:11:49PM +0100, Timm Essigke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I tried to run stereo mode (CrystallEyes) in VMD1.3 (because VMD1.4 seem
> not to support it anymore ?) on a SGI Indigo2 (R8000, IRIX 6.5). I have
> the same problems as described earlier in this mailing list (John Stone,
> 17 Feb 1999).
> I think the graphics card is a Extreme graphics, too. The gfxinfo output
> is:
>
> "Graphics board 0 is "GR2" graphics.
> Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
> 4 GEs, 1 RE, 24 bitplanes, 4 auxplanes, 4 cidplanes, Z-buffer
> GR2 revision 4, VB2.0
> HQ2.1 rev A, GE7 rev B, RE3.1 rev A, VC1 rev B, MC rev D
> 19" monitor "
>
> Had there been written an X server extension?
> I would highly appreciate, if you could send it to me.

Until appropriate use is made of the SGI X server extensions, the OpenGL
version of VMD won't do the stereo modes on that kind of machine.
The GL version of VMD should work fine on this hardware however, once you
install the onstereo/offstereo programs. That machine may actually run
faster with GL anyway, as I believe it was hardware designed for GL not
for OpenGL. (and there are a few low level differences between the two..)

> All our newer machines are Linux-boxes. Is there any support of stereo
> graphics planed? Graphic cards with shutter glasses for PC got quite
> cheap recently. Has anybody experience with them?

VMD supports stereo on all platforms that have a real GLX implementation that
provides "quad buffered" or "stereo in window" stereo support. In the case
of Linux only the commercial OpenGL servers provide this at the moment.
We've actually built VMD using Xi Graphics' commercial X server and OpenGL
libraries in the past, but since the binaries won't run on any other machines
we never distributed them. (anyone who owns the Xi Graphics software can
always compile their own hardware accelerated VMD for Linux...)

In the near future XFree86 will finally be providing a real implementation
of GLX. Although I have not personally looked at how complete it will be,
I would be very surprised if they don't implement stereo support in their GLX
implementation. There are several consumer priced video boards available
already which have the "Vesa stereo connector" on them. We have a PC
with stereo sync outputs, but its a Windows NT box. So at the moment,
the issue with supporting stereo on linux comes down to one of two choices:

  1) Wait for XFree86 4.x to come out (or pre-release versions) with drivers
     for hardware accelerated video boards that have stereo sync outputs.
 
  2) Buy a commercial X server, OpenGL and GLX implementation from one of
     the vendors that supports linux well.

So, if you're in a hurry, then option 2) might be worth looking at, but if you
can wait, then option 1) is probably the best bet.

> We would like to buy them for our PCs if there would be any support in VMD.

I know that there are a number of appropriate video boards out there,
its all a question of whether or not the video boards you want are supported
by the X Server and OpenGL libraries. VMD is the last link in the chain,
and is the cheapest and easiest to tweak for your purposes if necessary.
So, you need to decide who to get your X server and OpenGL libraries from
first, but once you know what you want I would be happy to work with you
to build a VMD binary for your system, whichever route you decide to go.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
Theoretical Biophysics Group   Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu
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