Stereo with Quadro 3700s?

Post by **AndyL** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:45 am

I'm having a problem with the Quadro 3700.

Our business relies on shipping out PCs that can run two displays, one monoscopic display to a monitor and one stereoscopic display, typically to an eMagin z800 head-mounted display.
Recently our PC supplier stopped carrying 3500, and shipped us a batch of 3700s instead. When we were preparing these computers to ship to customer sites we realized that they didn't seem to support the type of stereo needed. ('Shutter Glasses')

Our immediate problem was solved by finding a place that sold 3500s and swapping them out. However, now we've got a stack of 3700s that don't work for us. Not only that we've got more orders that we've got to fill, and we're uncertain that we'll be able to continue getting 3500s.

Is there some way we could be fixing this and making it work with the newer cards? Could we be using older drivers that would still support it? Failing that, is anyone aware of any ATI offerings with similar capabilities that would work for us?
Even making minor changes to our software would be acceptable, but very much non-ideal.

I'm told that the 3600 used in our portable systems is apparently giving us the same problem.

Since our business depends on being able to build systems that display stereo to an eMagin, you can imagine that we're all rather concerned about this.

Thank you very much for any help you can provide.

-Andy

Post by **Neil** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:58 am

May I ask what kind of stereo you display? DirectX, OpenGL, something else?

Is it a native support or something you are running through a driver?

Regards,
Neil

Post by **AndyL** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 9:16 am

Our software uses OpenGL. It is based on OpenSceneGraph and we use OSG's built-in quad-buffer support.

I'm obviously willing to fiddle with the software to make this work. But wholesale conversion of the whole app to DirectX is not feasible.

We're also willing to switch HMD technologies if we can stay within the price range. I'm sure we can find enough older NVidia cards to drive the eMagins we've got in stock. The issue there is that we enjoy the z800's rather slim form factor, but if that had to be sacrificed, I suppose we could make do.

Thanks for your interest and your quick response!

-Andy

P.S. : If anyone is interested our product is here : http://simwelder.com/index.html

Post by **Neil** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 9:30 am

Ok. Let me see what I can do.

Regards,
Neil

Post by **BlackQ** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 10:15 pm

did you try your software with our (iZ3D) driver OpenGL QB mode? You can download it from our web site and have 30 days free trial for experiment. As for output you can set anaglyph or HMD (dual projector) mode to check 3d quality (if you have not iZ3D monitor)

Post by **budda** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 2:53 am

Hi,

If you want workstation openGL then you have some very good options.

The idea is to buy a gaming card which can be converted through software to a workstation card with all professional capabilities enabled, including openGL stereo.

OPTION 1

Software modify an Nvidia Geforce 6800GT card to an Nvidia Quadro FX4000 +.

Visit this site for important software modding details :- http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=172822

OPTION 2

A better option is to software modify an ATI Radeon HD3870 to ATI FireGL V7700.

Visit this site for important software modding details : - http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=255976

OPTION 3

Other older and cheaper ATI gamer cards can be software modified as well. Look and you shall find.

Happy reading.

Thanks.

Post by **Tril** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 7:35 am

I don't understand why the 3500 works while the 3700 does not. They are both classified as high-end cards by NVIDIA so you think they would be about equal.

What OS are you using (XP, Vista 32 bits, Vista 64 bits, Linux, etc)?
Which NVIDIA driver version did try?
Do you display in monoscopic on the monitor at the same time as you display in stereoscopic on the Z800 (I think this is what you mean in the fist post, just confirming)?
Is your application windowed or fullscreen?

Post by **AndyL** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:06 am

BlackQ wrote:did you try your software with our (iZ3D) driver OpenGL QB mode? You can download it from our web site and have 30 days free trial for experiment. As for output you can set anaglyph or HMD (dual projector) mode to check 3d quality (if you have not iZ3D monitor)

I tried that briefly yesterday. I verified that anaglyph worked (great fun), and dual projector appeared to work. (I didn't feel like digging through our Closet of Old VR Stuff to find a compatible headmount.) But the Z800 does not work on dual output stereo. It needs some form of alternating frames that many shutter glasses use.
I'm not aware of any headmounts in the Z800's price range that run on dual outputs, so I'm not sure if the iZ3D drivers would help me. In any case, dual outputs is not an ideal solution, because our system also needs to drive a monitor.

Thanks, anyway though.

budda wrote:opengGL on the cheap

I'm not trying to do anything on the cheap. I have doubts as to whether it's even legal to resell cards that have been soft-modified like that, but that's beside the point. We're willing to buy the real cards at market value.

The problem is that I can not identify a card currently being manufactured that satisfies our requirements.

In other news I'm still looking, we picked up a FireGL 7200 on rumors that it might fit the bill. If it does, I can not figure out how to make it work. I can't help the growing feeling that I'm somehow being really stupid. It seems crazy to me that NVidia makes one change to their equipment and now the entire 3d industry is crippled, I must be missing something, I just don't know what.

-Andy

Post by **Tril** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:26 am

Could you please reply to the few questions I asked.

Post by **AndyL** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:26 am

Wow, thanks for all the quick feedback, everybody. This forum is great.

Tril wrote:I don't understand why the 3500 works while the 3700 does not. They are both classified as high-end cards by NVIDIA so you think they would be about equal.

Yea, we thought the same thing.
I suspect that the newer card was intentionally crippled by NVidia. I can't fathom why.

What OS are you using (XP, Vista 32 bits, Vista 64 bits, Linux, etc)?
Which NVIDIA driver version did try?

We're currently using XP. Presumably going forward we're going to have to upgrade to Vista, but at the moment we're sticking with what we know works.
Linux is an interesting question. We've considered it in the past. If Linux offered a way to get around this NVidia problem we might try porting our software. That would be a drastic step though.

We tried a whole bunch of drivers. We tried the current one along with a bunch of drivers up to over a year old. I don't have the version numbers handy.
We only tried official NVidia ones, however. If there are unofficial ones that would bring back this functionality, I'd love to hear about them.

Do you display in monoscopic on the monitor at the same time as you display in stereoscopic on the Z800 (I think this is what you mean in the fist post, just confirming)?

Correct. The Z800 displays an immersive 3d VR environment. The monitor shows a GUI, but the gui can also display a "user's view" window which shows a monoscopic version of what the immersed user is seeing. (Or it can show graphs, reports, etc.)

This video doesn't do justice to our graphics, but it gives you a good idea of our setup. -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTsJdzSmLos

Thanks,

-Andy

Post by **AndyL** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:27 am

Tril wrote:Could you please reply to the few questions I asked.

Sorry, You posted your questions while I was already typing that other post.

-Andy

Post by **Tril** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:36 am

I've got a suggestion in case everything else fails.

Another possibility would be to use the iZ3D drivers with a Christie PASSIVE TO ACTIVE SIGNAL CONVERTER (38-804653-01). This converter takes two inputs and outputs in a pageflipping mode (like the NVIDIA shutter glasses mode). It is limited to input resolutions from 640 x 480 (VGA) up to 1280 x 1024 (SXGA). It also supports over/under and line interleaved stereo. I'm not entirely sure this would work because the PA converter requires the two inputs to be genlocked so you would need a video card that supports that.

Since you also need a monoscopic output, you would either need a second video card or you would have to use a VGA or DVI splitter before the converter. VGA splitters are cheap but I think DVI splitters are more expensive (the slight delay it introduces should be insignificant).

Post by **AndyL** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:56 am

Tril wrote:I've got a suggestion in case everything else fails. [...] Another possibility would be to use the iZ3D drivers with a Christie PASSIVE TO ACTIVE SIGNAL CONVERTER (38-804653-01). This converter takes two inputs and outputs in a pageflipping mode (like the NVIDIA shutter glasses mode).

Hmm. Thank you. I will investigate this.

Since you also need a monoscopic output, you would either need a second video card or you would have to use a VGA or DVI splitter before the converter.

Yea, we'd need a second video card to display our GUI to the monitor. This could get expensive, but it would be better than shipping without stereo.

Thanks for your suggestion.

-Andy

Post by **Tril** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:58 am

The release notes of the latest NVIDIA drivers for the Quadro on XP (169.96) say that quad buffered stereo does not support DDC VGA for G8x series GPUs. These are the Quadro FX 370, 570, 1700, 4600 and 5600.

From what I could find, the 3500 is a G71 series GPU (G71GL) and the 5700 is a G9x series GPU (G92).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_quadro)

The release notes don't say anything about the G9x series support of the shutter glasses mode but since it's not supported in the previous GPU version, it"s likely that it's not in this one too. The best way to know for sure would be to ask NVIDIA directly but since they're a big company, it may be hard to get the answer since you will likely get a reply from someone working in customer service who does not know the answer. The only people that would know for sure would be the developers of the drivers. It seems illogical to remove capabilities as they release newer products but as their release notes show, they did it in the past.

Post by **cybereality** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 2:44 pm

AndyL wrote:I suspect that the newer card was intentionally crippled by NVidia. I can't fathom why.

You are not alone. I am very interested to know what Nvidia was thinking. Both their latest hardware and drivers intentionally cripple stereo-3d for a variety of devices.

Post by **Tril** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 3:43 pm

cybereality wrote:
AndyL wrote:I suspect that the newer card was intentionally crippled by NVidia. I can't fathom why.
You are not alone. I am very interested to know what Nvidia was thinking. Both their latest hardware and drivers intentionally cripple stereo-3d for a variety of devices.

I'm guessing that you're talking about the consumer stereo 3D drivers. That's a (slightly) different story. It's for consumer cards and we're not paying a premium (except that at the price the current consumers pay for the latest consumer generation cards, it's about as much expensive as what the professional sometimes pay on the lower end models) to get S-3D support like the professionals do.

To me, a good specially made for professionals is more costly because the company making it does everything in their power to suit the special needs of its clients in the shortest amount of time possible. It does not make business sense for a company designing products for professionals to discontinue a past product and at the same time drop backward compatibility, in their new products, for a feature that was the selling point of their past products.

The Quadro line of cards is for professionals that pay a premium to get cards designed to meet their needs. It does not make sense to not support quad buffered stereo (if they want to sell cards, make money, make their clients happy, make their investors happy, etc).

About the FireGL 7200. Its datasheet (http://ati.amd.com/products/fireglv7200 ... asheet.pdf) says "Display Capabilities : Stereoscopic 3D output connector
with quad buffer support" so it should normally work. Try the new driver released yesterday. It might help. Here's something from the changelog :

Workstation 8.502 Release Notes
Enabling quad buffer stereo within the Catalyst Control Center no longer results in a secondary reboot prompt and the quad buffer stereo option failing to be applied

Post by **cybereality** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 6:20 pm

Tril wrote:...because the company making it does everything in their power to suit the special needs of its clients in the shortest amount of time possible...

Are we talking about the same company here?

Post by **Tril** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 7:41 pm

I was talking generically about what a company that sells professional goods should do. You know, the kind of companies that sell sweet products for which you need to ask for a quote if you want to know the price. And everybody know that when you need to ask for the price, it's too expensive for the common folks and it's targeted at businesses that can and will pay the price.

NVIDIA is not exactly that kind of company but its professional cards side is close to that. Some of their professional higher end cards are very expensive (over $1000 each).

Post by **BrotherDog** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 11:04 pm

AndyL wrote:Our software uses OpenGL. It is based on OpenSceneGraph and we use OSG's built-in quad-buffer support.

I'm obviously willing to fiddle with the software to make this work. But wholesale conversion of the whole app to DirectX is not feasible.

We're also willing to switch HMD technologies if we can stay within the price range. I'm sure we can find enough older NVidia cards to drive the eMagins we've got in stock. The issue there is that we enjoy the z800's rather slim form factor, but if that had to be sacrificed, I suppose we could make do.

Thanks for your interest and your quick response!

-Andy

P.S. : If anyone is interested our product is here : http://simwelder.com/index.html

Errr .. What do you mean by the shutter glasses stereo does not work? Do you mean it is not available in the nvidia control panel or all the options are available but when you run your software, the stereo is not working?

Post by **BlackQ** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:03 am

I only can say that based on our experience nVidia Quadro family is a but unpredictable

Thus in our driver we have Emulation mode to run OpenGL QB applications on any card. For iZ3D is it also important because with Clone mode (Quadro 3D works only in Clone) 2d interfaces looks bad on iZ3D monitor - we need DualView mode

Post by **AndyL** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 7:07 am

To be clear, the cards still appear to support Quad-buffer, but they do not appear to support the output type I need. (The driver control panel used to call it "Shutterglasses", I assume pagefliping.)

BrotherDog wrote:Errr .. What do you mean by the shutter glasses stereo does not work? Do you mean it is not available in the nvidia control panel or all the options are available but when you run your software, the stereo is not working?

I mean that the option is not available in the control panel. (But only when the newer card is plugged in. If I swap it out for the older card it works great.)

Post by **BrotherDog** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:35 am

I mean that the option is not available in the control panel. (But only when the newer card is plugged in. If I swap it out for the older card it works great.)

I assume that the control panel offers the enable stereo and the list of few types of quad buffer stereo but not shutter glasses then.
I have experienced in the past that the control panel does not allow the selection of "onboard DIN" stereo, in fact the "stereo mode" indicated on the control panel was wrong and misleading. I had to set the opengl registry variable to explicitly activate that stereo mode. I wonder if yours is a similiar problem.

Post by **LukePC1** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:15 am

Now as we seem to have some experts about workstation cards: can someone explain the difference to me?

I know the workstation cards cost 2-5 times more (roughly) and that they can use quadbuffered S-3D. Is that all???

As Tril said, the ATI cards should work equally good, but I don't know, why they don't implement it for normal cards... would be fun for gamers

And to the topic: In case you decide to use multiple GPUs, you could use the TDVisor. It should have similar specs at a similar price, but it has dualinput natively. It does not have headtracking, though...

Post by **fonzee** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 12:08 pm

I am working with a Nvidia 3700 Quadro card now and I can get the stereo to work with our VR software (EON Reality), but we cannot get any of the games to work. I have also tried Google Earth 3d and can get the emitter (Using shutter glasses) to turn on, but it still seems like our settings are screwed up. I am on a continuing quest to get this to work and feel that I am close. I am however having trouble turning stereo on and off as well as being able to adjust the sep and conv. I believe this is because I do not have the stereo driver which has the hot keys. I am now trying to find a compatible forceware driver and stereo driver of the same number as well as supported by 64 bit. ANyone know where I can get 64 bit drivers?

Post by **petersik** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 4:00 am

@AndyL
You are perfectly correct: The output type required to drive the Z800 is no longer supported by the latest Nvidia cards.
What you need is shutter glasses output for DDC controlled shutter glasses. All current Quadros like FX570, FX1700, FX3700 do not support DDC shutter glasses.
I could imagine several solutions:
1. Nvidia could add DDC shutter glasses for current cards in their drivers (very unlikely)
2. Emagin could add a sync input where you can connect the stereo-DIN output of the Quadro board to the Z800 controller (unlikely)
3. You build an adapter which feeds the signal from the onboard stereo-DIN connector to the VGA signal as DDC signal (I don't even know if this could work)
4. You buy another HMD which accepts frame sequential input and stereo-DIN input (see 2)
5. You buy a Quadro FX 1500 which is perfectly working

BTW: The problem is exactly the same with Linux

Good luck and keep me informed, please.

Andreas Petersik

Post by **petersik** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 4:04 am

Maybe I have found a solution:
You have to get the LabTool from Emagin, read here:
http://www.worldviz.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1296

Andreas