VMD 3D Acceleration Notes
VMD has been tested with and benefits from hardware 3D acceleration on many OpenGL-capable graphics accelerators. Note that some of these boards only provide hardware acceleration when they are running in particular display modes. The list below are 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 which provide a form of stereo support, but not through the normal OpenGL interfaces. Unless the board works with the quad-buffered OpenGL stereo interfaces, we have marked it as a "no" in the stereo column. It is still possible to use the "side-by-side" and "scanline-interleaved" stereo modes in VMD even on cards labeled with "no in the stereo column.
VMD supports OpenGL multisample antialiasing in high-end graphics boards. Presently this feature is only found in the Unix versions of VMD, but eventually it will make its way into the Windows and Mac versions of VMD as well. The workstation graphics table below notes whether or not we have tested the antialiasing feature in VMD with each listed hardware configuration.
Workstation graphics accelerators
| Video Board / Vendor | OS | Stereo | Antialiasing | Video Mode/Settings Notes |
| Compaq/HP Powertorm 300 | Tru64 4.0F | Yes | No | |
| HP Visualize FX10 | HP-UX 11.0 | Yes | No | |
| HP SV6 Cluster | HP-UX 11.0 | Yes | Yes | VMD cannot enable or disable antialiasing, it is set system-wide |
| IBM POWER GXT300P | AIX 4.3.x | No | No | |
| IBM POWER GXT6000P | AIX 4.3.x | Unknown | Unknown | |
| SGI Indigo2 MaximumImpact | IRIX 6.5.x | Yes | No | Must be in the quad-buffered stereo mode in order to use VMD in stereo. |
| SGI InfiniteReality2 | IRIX 6.5.x | Yes | Yes | Must be in the quad-buffered stereo mode in order to use VMD in stereo. Not all video resolutions can support multisample antialiasing, usually only the lower resolutions leave enough video memory. |
| SGI Octane2 | IRIX 6.5.x | Yes | Yes | Must be in the quad-buffered stereo mode in order to use VMD in stereo. Note that there are several graphics board variations available, some boards do not support all features, particularly when running with two display channels. Not all video resolutions can support multisample antialiasing, usually only the lower resolutions leave enough video memory. |
| Sun Elite3D | Solaris 8 | Yes | No | Must be in the quad-buffered stereo mode in order to use VMD in stereo. |
| Sun Expert3D / Expert3D-lite | Solaris 8 | Yes | Yes | Have not tested antialiasing on this hardware |
| Sun XVR-500 | Solaris 8 | Yes | Yes | Have not tested antialiasing on this hardware |
| Sun XVR-1000 | Solaris 8 | Yes | Yes | Use "fbconfig -multisample enable dynamic" for best antialiasing with VMD |
| Sun XVR-1200 | Solaris 8 | Yes | Yes | |
| Sun XVR-4000 | Solaris 8 | Yes | Yes | Use "fbconfig -multisample available -samples max -jitter auto" for best antialiasing with VMD |
PC graphics accelerators
| Video Board / Vendor | 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 | Reported to work very well. | |
| 3DLabs Oxygen VX-1600 | NT/Win2K | No | Reported to work very well, runs SGI 1600SW flat-panel. |
| 3DLabs Permedia | NT | 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 | Yes | Reported to work very well |
| Diamond FireGL 1 | NT/Win2K | Yes | |
| Diamond FireGL 2 | NT/Win2K | Yes | |
| Diamond FireGL 4 | NT/Win2K | Yes | |
| 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/Win2K | Yes | Get the latest drivers. |
| HP Visualize FX10 | NT/Win2K | Yes | |
| Intergraph "Z" | NT | Yes | |
| 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. |
| NVidia GeForce256 | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work. |
| NVidia GeForce256-DDR | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work. |
| NVidia GeForce 2 GTS | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work. |
| NVidia GeForce 3 | Win2K, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work. Linux drivers still aren't as reliable or fast as the Windows drivers, but still good. |
| NVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 | Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work. Linux drivers still aren't as reliable or fast as the Windows drivers, but still good. |
| NVidia Quadro | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. |
| NVidia Quadro2 | NT, Linux | No | All 32-bit and 16-bit color modes work great. |
| SGI Visual Workstation 320 | NT | Yes | Any of the modes should work fine. |
