[Chimera-users] stereo viewing with consumer graphics cards

[Greg Couch]

In the past, Chimera has always needed a workstation-class graphics card 
(e.g., AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Quadro) to view molecules in 3D stereo and 
read dialogs at the same time.  Now that there are 3D HDTVs, that has 
changed.

I have just confirmed that with a computer running Microsoft Windows 8, 
with an AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card, and a Panasonic 3D HDTV, that 
3D stereo worked without fiddling with any display settings.

That is awesome -- "without fiddling with any display settings".

Windows 8 is a requirement, Windows 7 will not work.  I am unaware of 
any effort to get Linux to work.  There is a good chance that Apple Mac 
OS X will work and we plan to test that soon.

Any recent AMD Radeon HD graphics card with HD3D, or NVIDIA GeForce 
graphics card with 3D Vision support, should work.  I hope to test a 
NVIDIA graphics card soon to confirm that.

And supposedly, any 3D HDTV will work.  The 3D HDTV in the test was a 
Panasonic TC-P50GT25, from 2010/2011, and I expect that any 3D HDTV that 
support a full resolution stereoscopic 3D format will work well.  
Non-full resolution formats would work for the 3D stereo images, but the 
associated 2D dialogs would be unreadable.

     Happy 3D viewing!

     Greg