VMD 3D Acceleration Notes
VMD has been tested with and benefits from hardware 3D acceleration on many OpenGL-capable PCI/AGP video boards. Note that some of these boards only provide hardware acceleration when they are running in particular display modes. The list below are PCI/AGP video boards and configurations that have been recently tested by us or are thought to work well with VMD. Note that the "Stereo" column indicates that a board support full quad-buffered frame-sequential stereo, and that it works correctly with the standard OpenGL interfaces. There are several video boards (ELSA and others) which come with low-end stereo glasses which do not support stereo in OpenGL using the normal interfaces. Unless the board works with the standard OpenGL stereo interfaces, we have marked it as a "no" in the stereo column, as VMD does not contain any vendor-specific stereo display code currently.
Video Board | OS | Stereo | Video Mode/Settings Notes |
3DFX Voodoo3 | Win98 | No | Must be in 16-bit color mode and using latest drivers in order for any OpenGL acceleration to work. The Win98 1.03.00 drivers worked beautifully for us, no problems. |
3DFX Voodoo3 | NT | No | Must be in 16-bit color mode and using latest drivers in order for any OpenGL acceleration to work. |
3DLabs GVX1 | NT/Win2K | Unknown | Reported to work very well. |
3DLabs Oxygen VX-1600 | NT/Win2K | No | Reported to work very very well, runs SGI 1600SW flat-panel. |
3DLabs Permedia | NT | Unknown | 1024x768 |
ATI Rage Mobility 128 AGP 4X | Windows 2000 | No | Works with 1600x1200 resolution |
ATI Rage Pro Turbo | NT | No | Must be in Truecolor mode for hardware acceleration |
ATI Rage Fury (Rage 128 chip) | NT | No | Must be in 16-bit color or Truecolor mode for hardware acceleration In the "ATI OpenGL" tab, select "Performance" in the "optimization preference" radio buttons. |
Diamond FireGL 1000 8MB AGP | NT | Yes | Get latest driver, set for 1024x768, use "3D stereo support" configuration file under display properties. (with older drivers, use 800x600, 16-bit color, and "2nd Z-buffer" option) |
Diamond FireGL 4000 | NT/Win2K | Unknown | Reported to work very well |
Diamond FireGL 1 | NT/Win2K | Unknown | Unknown |
Diamond FireGL 2 | NT/Win2K | Unknown | Unknown |
Diamond FireGL 4 | NT/Win2K | Unknown | Unknown |
Diamond Viper 770 (NVidia TNT2 Ultra) | NT | No | Both Truecolor and 16-bit color mode work fine. |
Evans and Sutherland AccelStar-II | NT | Yes | 1024x768, 16-bit color, possibly several other modes. |
HP Visualize FX6 | NT | Yes | Get the latest drivers, very fast. |
HP Visualize FX10 | NT/Win2k | Yes | Unknown |
Intergraph "Z" | NT | Yes | Nice and fast. |
Matrox G400 | NT | No | 32-bit color 1024x768 works fine |
NVidia TNT2 Ultra | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. |
NVidia GeForce256 | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. (fast) |
NVidia GeForce256-DDR | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. (fast) |
NVidia GeForce 2 GTS | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. (very fast) |
NVidia GeForce 2 Ultra | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. (very very fast) |
NVidia GeForce 3 | NT, Linux | No | Unknown |
NVidia Quadro | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. (very fast) |
NVidia Quadro2 | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. (very fast) |
SGI Visual Workstation 320 | NT | Yes | Any of the modes should work, very fast. |