Now that the release of Windows 7 is coming nearer and the support for XP is slowly running out, I was thinking of updating my softwares(source codes) that are capable of using GL_STEREO to be able to run on Vista and Windows 7.
So, I have a Vista Business SP1 installed and a (old) Quadro FX 1400(with lastest drivers 181.20) that is perfectly doing quad-buffered-stereo on XP. (The Stereo-Settings in the nVidia Control Center are set to the necessary values.)
As far as I know windowed-stereo is not supported on Vista, but fullscreen-stereo should work. But how do I initialize a fullscreen DC/RC with stereo? Using ChangeDisplaySettings and stuff, I was able to a fullscreen DC/RC, but no stereo support. (The same code runs fine incl. stereo on XP.)
Does anyone has some code that is able to do the trick of getting stereo-support on vista?
i dont know about windows 7 (probably the same as vista)
but in vista you create a window with a stereo pixel format the same way as you do in XP, with the PDF_STEREO flag. Just in vista because of the driver architecture and aero you’ll only ever get the left view displayed in windowed mode. The nvidia drivers have extremely limited support for fullscreen stereo, ie just shutter mode.
I kind of thought. Problem is that the Control Panel show all stereo settings (as in XP), but I (and GLView 3.0 http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview , too) can’t find a PixelFormat with PDF_STEREO set.
.oO(Seems that it’s a driver problem, or they shut down the stereo support for my Quadro FX 1400 without mention it in the release notes.)°
hmm, seems to be a problem with the Quadro FX 1400. The Quadro FX 4600 of a colleague is working perfectly (even better, windowed stereo is working too; so much for ‘This is an operating system limitation.’ [Release Notes, Page 14]).
I still have to check the Quadro FX 3500 of another colleague for more evidence, but I think I’ll write/send a bug report to nvidia.
I am seeing the same thing: no quad buffered stereo on Quadro FX 1400 with any tested W7 driver (190.38 -> 259.12) or application (all of which work perfectly on XP, including with the matching driver version on that platform). Did you ever find a way to do this or receive info back from Nvidia? I also filed a bug report (before finding this post), but so far no response from Nvidia. Ironically on the same machine, boot Ubuntu and stereo works fine, including for the Windows apps running under Wine. It is a strange day indeed when the linux driver has better support than the Windows one!
Just to close out this thread, after much prodding on my part Nvidia support finally sent me this:
Quadro FX 1400 is a legacy card (G41 where G=3DGeneration) and unfortunately we don’t support stereo on Win7 on cards which are older than G80. The reason for this is, legacy cards lack the hardware features which are required to support current stereo features on Windows 7.
Bottom line, older Nvidia cards are out of luck for Quad Buffered stereo on W7. (One would assume that will be true for W8 and all future Windows). The Nvidia Linux driver still does stereo on these cards. If memory serves I was able to run some applications in Wine with hardware stereo, but the workstations in question were downgraded back to XP.
This problem with older cards is still not documented in Nvidia’s release notes, and they sent me the above message 9 months ago!