VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 03 2012 - 12:01:10 CDT

Hi,
  To setup 3-D stereoscopic display on Linux, you'll need to have
an NVIDIA Quadro card and a set of glasses/emitters and a display
that they are compatible with. Over the years, our lab has used
Quadro 4000, 5600, 5800, 6000, and QuadroPlex GPUs to drive our
various stereo workstations and projectors. Lately we are using
polarized passive stereo projection systems, and on desktops
we're using Acer stereo LCD displays with built-in emitters with
the NVIDIA shutter glasses. Of all of the different options, the
most important choice (and usually most expensive part) is what
GPUs you use. If you really plan to do a lot of stereoscopic
display work, you will want to spend the money to get one of the
higher-end Quadro cards. Some of the low-end Quadro cards aren't
really meant for stereoscopic display and don't have enough horsepower
to do it well. Keep in mind that stereoscopic display requires twice
as much work, so even the high-end Quadro 6000 cards end up running
noticably slower when running in stereo than when doing monoscopic
interactive VMD display.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 12:37:48PM -0400, Vikas Varshney wrote:
> Dear John, Users,
>
> I intend to visualize my MD trajectories and molecules of interest on
> Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 (Tikanga)) in 3D.I will highly
> appreciate if you guys could guide me what hardware I need to get
> (graphics card, monitors, glasses)?
>
> Before writing, I tried searching through archive to see if other people
> have asked the same question but only got two hits.
> Once from 2010 (related to VMD 1.8.7; it was not very clear to me) and
> other recent one which was focused on Windows (which linked to UNC website
> tutorial to set up simple stereo system).
>
> Thanks for your guidance.
>
> Best Regards,
> Vikas 

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