
Almost a year ago, I asked if there were plans to support stereo on Mac OS X. Greg replied that Chimera could only when Mac OS X supported stereo-in-a-window (see my question and Greg Couch's answer below). There seems to have been some progress on this by Apple. Their "scientific visualization" page (http://www.apple.com/science/ researchsolutions/visualization.html) says: Thanks to its PCI Express architecture, the Power Mac G5 with the optional NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics card gives researchers 3D stereo-in-a-window capabilities using a CRT display and Stereographics CrystalEyes liquid crystal shutter eyewear and E2Mac emitter. See also http://www.stereographics.com/apple.html. If I buy the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics card, will I now be able to run Chimera in stereo on a Mac? Thanks. David On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, David Belnap wrote:
As a follow-up to the discussion about stereo by Virginia and Sabuj, will Chimera currently, or in the future, work in stereo on a Mac running OS X?
Only if Mac OS X supports stereo-in-a-window. That appears to be unlikely because stereo-in-a-window is a feature that is only supported on workstation-class graphics cards (NVidia Quadro, ATI FireGL, 3DLabs Wildcat), and Apple only sells consumer-class graphics cards (NVidia GeForce, ATI Radeon). chimera needs stereo-in-a-window, instead of full-screen stereo, so the scientist can still use the dialogs to control chimera. If we figure out a reasonable way to keep the (mono) dialogs working in full-screen stereo, then we will support stereo on the Mac. (This also presupposes that most of the Tcl/Tk on Aqua bugs are fixed.) For some other thoughts about stereo hardware, see: <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimera-users/2004-September/ 000197.html> Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab gregc@cgl.ucsf.edu ============================================ David M. Belnap Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84602 USA Phone: 801-422-9163 FAX: 801-422-0153 David_Belnap@byu.edu ============================================