VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 20 2010 - 10:05:14 CST

Hi,
  Not as far as I am aware. I had a detailed discussion with the NVIDIA
engineers previously, where I asked them about support for
quad-buffered OpenGL in regards to their latest stereo drivers, and
they indicated very clearly to me that they were only planning to
support quad-buffered OpenGL on the Quadro cards and not on the
GeForce cards. So far as I know, there is no way around this limitation.
That said, my understanding is that even the low-end Quadro FX GPUs
support all of the LCD stereo options now.

There is a chart comparing all of the various Quadro GPUs here:
  http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

If you end up buying a Quadro and you have two PCIe x16 slots and
power supply with enough connectors, you could keep your existing
GeForce 9800 card and have VMD use it as an additional CUDA accelerator
for things like calculating electrostatics, molecular orbitals,
molecular surfaces (in upcoming revs of VMD), and other computationally
demanding tasks.

Cheers,
  John

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 10:39:38AM -0500, Deepangi Pandit wrote:
> Hi John:
> Thank you for your explanation. I am just curious, is there anyway I
> could make current card Quad-Buffered enabled? In the sense can
> current card be set to read in quad-buffered mode.
>
> Best,
> Deepa
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 6:57 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >  At the present time, NVIDIA only supports quad-buffered stereo
> > (as is needed for VMD and similar apps) on their Quadro line of GPUs.
> > The GeForce GPUs are only supported for full-screen stereo gaming
> > with OpenGL, windowed display modes such as are used by VMD require
> > Quadro GPUs.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >  John Stone
> >  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 06:32:04PM -0500, Deepangi Pandit wrote:
> >> Hi:
> >> I would like to view 3D Stereo on VMD 1.8.7. Please suggest what
> >> setting do I need to make to do so. Below are the relevant system
> >> details
> >>
> >> 1. OS: Windows 7
> >>
> >> 2. Monitor:Samsung Syncmaster 2233RZ 22in 3D Gaming LCD
> >>
> >> 3. Card: EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB PCIe w/Dual Link DVI
> >>
> >> 4. Glasses: NVIDIA 3D Vision Glasses
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Deepa
> >
> > --
> > NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> > Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> > University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> > Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
> >  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078
> > 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078