Active (quadbuffer) stereo mode

[esteel]

That sounds really cool.. to bad i can't test it

[syschuck]

Hardware wise, it's not too difficult to find the parts needed. Cards that should
work are all of the Nvidia Quadro series, all of the ATI firegl series and some of
the Matrox cards. The high-end of those cards really go through the roof in
price. On the low-to-mid range they are between $200-300. My personal
system is based on a quadro FX 500 (AGP with an Althon 1.4Ghz processor
running Mandriva Linux 2006). That card cost about $250 a year or so ago
and has about the same capabilities as a GeForce FX 5200. Not exactly a
great game card by today's standards but good enough.

For the glasses or displays there are a lot of options for Head mounted
displays to LCD shutter glasses, to Auto-stereo LCD panels. With LCD
shutter glasses, you need a CRT monitor with a high vertical refresh rate
(ie, high-res 1280x1024@75hz or better). If you have a LCD display, then
look at an HMD. Look at;

[url]
http://www.i-glassesstore.com/3dgaming.html
[/url]
They have some good HMDs and LCD shutter glasses that are pretty
affordable. What I have is the 'i-ware 3D Games Glasses Pack' which
comes with a wired pair of LCD shutter glasses and a video dongle which
takes stereo sync signals from the graphics card over the DCC signaling
channel to toggel the which eye is dark and which is clear. It costs about
$60 and for stereo on a CRT is the best $60 I've ever spent.
The other company worth looking at for consumer level HMD's is Emagin.
They make the best and most affordable HMD display system I know of.
at $549 it's nearly half the price of the HMD's from Iglassesstore. Not only
does it do stereo, but it also has an excellent USB based head tracker as
well. It works OK with linux but not the head tracking stuff (Ditto for Mac's
too) On Windows though, wow! Actually one of the projects I've been trying
to do in my spare time is to put together a driver for linux for the head tracking.
The Nexuiz engine will probably be what I experiment with.

Check out;

[url]
http://www.emagin.com/
[/url]

Best Regards
Chuck

[LordHavoc]

Hardware wise, it's not too difficult to find the parts needed. Cards that should
work are all of the Nvidia Quadro series, all of the ATI firegl series and some of
the Matrox cards. The high-end of those cards really go through the roof in
price. On the low-to-mid range they are between $200-300. My personal
system is based on a quadro FX 500 (AGP with an Althon 1.4Ghz processor
running Mandriva Linux 2006). That card cost about $250 a year or so ago
and has about the same capabilities as a GeForce FX 5200. Not exactly a
great game card by today's standards but good enough.

Quadros are simply exorbitantly expensive (that GFFX5200 for instance is absolutely horrible as a gaming card, it can barely run normal games at playable speeds, let alone doom3-class-graphics like Nexuiz uses), I don't see why they should be required for quadbuffer stereo.

I remember when ELSA brand NVIDIA video cards came with shutter glasses and did quadbuffer stereo on a consumer card for normal prices.

Of course shutter glasses have become more and more useless due to the rise in LCDs and the decline in CRTs (my dad owns one of the last ever 22" 2048x1536x85hz CRTs, Mitsubishi DP2070sb - sure, other 2048x1536 CRTs exist but not at a nice flicker free 85hz).

And ever since I switched to LCDs I can't imagine going back to CRTs, because LCD are just so much sharper, which mostly compensates for the drawbacks (scaling and LCD ghosting such as ripples trailing moving objects and strange transitions between green/purple).

For the glasses or displays there are a lot of options for Head mounted
displays to LCD shutter glasses, to Auto-stereo LCD panels. With LCD
shutter glasses, you need a CRT monitor with a high vertical refresh rate
(ie, high-res 1280x1024@75hz or better). If you have a LCD display, then
look at an HMD. Look at;

HMDs aren't exactly what I'd call 'cheap' either... though this is not unexpected as they have to use highres LCDs that would normally only be used in projectors.

My biggest complaint about HMDs is that I have trouble imagining being immersed in 800x600 graphics

[url]
http://www.i-glassesstore.com/3dgaming.html
[/url]
They have some good HMDs and LCD shutter glasses that are pretty
affordable. What I have is the 'i-ware 3D Games Glasses Pack' which
comes with a wired pair of LCD shutter glasses and a video dongle which
takes stereo sync signals from the graphics card over the DCC signaling
channel to toggel the which eye is dark and which is clear. It costs about
$60 and for stereo on a CRT is the best $60 I've ever spent.
The other company worth looking at for consumer level HMD's is Emagin.
They make the best and most affordable HMD display system I know of.
at $549 it's nearly half the price of the HMD's from Iglassesstore. Not only
does it do stereo, but it also has an excellent USB based head tracker as
well. It works OK with linux but not the head tracking stuff (Ditto for Mac's
too) On Windows though, wow! Actually one of the projects I've been trying
to do in my spare time is to put together a driver for linux for the head tracking.
The Nexuiz engine will probably be what I experiment with.

Check out;

[url]
http://www.emagin.com/
[/url]

Best Regards
Chuck

Interesting, it hadn't occurred to me that short-lived OLED displays would be reasonable as HMDs, since you don't tend to use them a lot.

Still exorbitant pricing as is common with HMDs however.

[syschuck]

Hi All,

LordHavoc; I couldn't agree with you more about how expensive HMD's and stereo enabled video cards are. Nvidia perticularly since there is no hardware reason that their consumer level cards can't support quad-buffer stereo. I have no experience with ATI.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that active stereo looks awsome in the 2.2.2 release and plays really good too. You have two really big thumbs up from me.

The new comand line switch for enabling the active stereo buffers took a little time to find so I'm passing along that little bit of info for the group. Here is what I'm using on my home linux box.

Code: Select all

./nexuiz-linux-glx.sh +vid_refreshrate 100 +vid_width 768 +vid_height 576 +vid_fullscreen 1 +vid_stereobuffer 1


Have Fun,
Chuck Sites

[LordHavoc]

The new comand line switch for enabling the active stereo buffers took a little time to find so I'm passing along that little bit of info for the group. Here is what I'm using on my home linux box.

vid_stereobuffer is a cvar as opposed to a commandline switch - it can be enabled at any time (followed by a vid_restart), I may add it to the engine menu someday (however the nexuiz menu is not handled by the engine and not my responsibility).