Stereo

Some of the Quadro cards support stereo. The cards that have an output called "stereo" under "Display Connectors" listed at Nvidia's Quadro overview page have a 3-pin DIN outlet that fits with NuVision or CrystalEyes stereo glasses.

The cheapest of these used to be the FX1400 (difficult to find these days, around 450 €), but now appears to be the FX3450 (around 750 €). These cards are by far fast enough for protein crystallography or modelling.

For stereo, the xorg.conf might need the following lines

       Section "Extensions"
         Option     "Composite" "Disable"
       EndSection

if the X log file (e.g. at /var/log/Xorg.0.log) says that stereo is not supported by composite.

Another option that will be required in xorg.conf by programs running stereo is

    Section "Device"
      Driver      "nvidia"
      Option      "Stereo" "3"

Sometimes it is handy to configure two Desktops: one on a CRT monitor that can do stereo-graphics, and one on an LCD monitor for the more regular work, eg your refinement jobs with CCP4. For Nvidia cards you need to modify the xorg.conf file to have a section more or less like that:

Section "Monitor"
   Identifier     "Monitor0"
   VendorName     "Iiyama"
   ModelName      "Vision Master Pro 512"
   DisplaySize     450      330
   HorizSync       31.5 - 120.0
   VertRefresh     50.0 - 150.0
   Option         "dpms"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
   Identifier     "Monitor1"
   VendorName     "Philips"
   ModelName      "150B"
EndSection
Section "Device"
   Identifier     "Videocard0"
   Driver         "nvidia"
   VendorName     "Videocard vendor"
   BoardName      "NVIDIA Quadro FX (generic)"
   BusId          "PCI:1:0:0"
   Screen         0
EndSection
Section "Device"
   Identifier     "Videocard1"
   Driver         "nvidia"
   VendorName     "Videocard vendor"
   BoardName      "NVIDIA Quadro FX (generic)"
   Option         "Stereo" "3"
   BusId          "PCI:1:0:0"
   Screen         1
EndSection
Section "Screen"
   Identifier     "Screen0"
   Device         "Videocard0"
   Monitor        "Monitor0"
   DefaultDepth    24 
   SubSection     "Display"
       Viewport    0 0
       Depth       24 
       Modes      "1024x768" "800x600"
   EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Screen"
   Identifier     "Screen1"
   Device         "Videocard1"
   Monitor        "Monitor1"
   DefaultDepth    24 
   SubSection     "Display"
       Viewport    0 0
       Depth       24 
       Modes      "1600x1280" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600"

Note that one can think this is rather silly to define two card, two monitors, two cards, and two screens. However, that the only way I know that one monitor can be stereo-enabled and the other one not.

Ono

You also need to set the environment variable STEREO for the stereo to work properly in ono: setenv STEREO on (tcsh) STEREO = on; export STEREO (bash) [1]

Mac OS X

The following command needs to be run for Macs to be able to support stereo in X11 programs, such as Coot [2] :

    defaults write com.apple.x11 enable_stereo -bool true