From: quantrum75 (quantrum75_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Nov 08 2010 - 17:31:55 CST

Thanks a lot everybody,
That clears up a lot of things. So, what I essentially understood from the replies is "consumer cards" GeForce 9800 won't work. And also the cheap glasses (thankfully, they were cheap off ebay) are of no use either.

So I was looking up stuff online and trying to decide. If I had 500$ to throw away, would I be able to get what I wanted? The stuff I was looking at was,

1) For the card,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133354&cm_re=quadro-_-14-133-354-_-Product

2) Do you have suggestion for glasses?

3) My third question is, Provided I have multiple PCI slots and bought the above quadro card and installed it alongside the GeForce, would VMD be able to recognize both of the cards? (Why? so that I can use the GeForce for rendering (2GB RAM) and Quadro for 3D visualization?

Thanks a lot for all of your responses. VMD is an awesome program!
Regards
Rama

--- On Mon, 11/8/10, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:

From: John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: vmd-l: 3D protein visualization
To: "quantrum75" <quantrum75_at_yahoo.com>
Cc: vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Date: Monday, November 8, 2010, 5:31 PM

Hi,
  The consumer stereo glasses do not work with windowed OpenGL applications
like VMD (or CAD programs, etc) except if you have a Quadro series graphics
board.  VMD does support scanline interleaved stereo modes that some of the
much older hardware supported, even on gaming oriented GPUs, but these modes
won't work on most of the current generation hardware.  The current generation
of consumer oriented 3-D glasses are designed only to support full-screen
games and movie playback.  I have looked at whether there would be any
reasonable way to support such a mode in VMD, but unfortunately even
the full-screen OpenGL is only supported on Windows.  I believe that under
Linux the only option is to use a Quadro GPU.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 10:37:50AM -0800, quantrum75 wrote:
>    Hi There,                                                                 
>    I am newbie when it comes to a lot of advanced functionality of VMD. I     
>    have question regarding the 3D visualization of protein molecules. I run a
>    Linux system with following configuration.                                 
>                                                                               
>    1) OS - Linux Ubuntu, 10.0 version                                         
>                                                                               
>    2) Graphics Card - NVidia GeForce 9800 with 2 GB RAM with CUDA             
>    acceleration                                                               
>                                                                               
>    3) VMD 1.8.7                                                               
>                                                                               
>    4) I also bought some stereo glasses (One eye piece is red and other is   
>    blue kind of thing, bought off ebay...oops).                               
>                                                                               
>    5) A Samsung syncmaster 22 inch LCD display                               
>                                                                               
>    I have failed in every way to be able to visualize the molecules in 3D. I 
>    have tried the various options in VMD to display the molecules and         
>    visualize them with the glasses without any success. Is there are         
>    straightforward tutorial of some sorts which can tell me what to get to be
>    able to see the molecules in 3D? I know I am doing something very stupid. 
>    But I have not been able to see any place a straight forward explanation   
>    of how to visualize the molecules in 3D (including the mailing lists)     
>                                                                               
>    Thanks!                                                                   
>    Rama                                                                       

-- 
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