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.