Stereoscopic Rendering with OpenGL --- System Setup

Hi there,

after some time i have decided to continue working on my own little OpenGL based game engine. Due to the fact that i ll be buying a 3DTV and a new computer in the next few month I thought it would be nice to implement stereoscopic rendering.

As far as I ve read this is possible by using quadbuffering. But your graphic card has to support it. So first questions are:

Do modern GeForce cards (for example 980 series) finally support this or do i have to buy one of the expensive Quadro cards?
If so, how is their performance compared to GeForce cards for normal, not stereoscopic rendering? Are they faster, equal or slower?

The other question is, are there practical alternatives to quadbuffering that arent some weird driver hacks and will run on up-to-date systems?

Regards,

ProgrammerX

A very simple alternative is to set your 3DTV to SBS mode. Create a normal double-buffered window, and render your scene twice with appropriate projection/viewport/scissor. Pros: no special driver/HW/genlock support needed, works with TV 3D glasses regardless of app framerate. Cons: half resolution.

Well I think I can live with half Resolution if it saves me 1000 Euros :wink: — I ve also read, that the gaming performance of the quadro cards is mostly worse than on Geforce cards. They are more for professional use and youre paying most of the Price for the Drivers license, not for the card itself. But in this case I really dont understand the policy of NVidea and ATI. I think there are enough Gamers who want to play their games in Stereo without loosing to much fps. So just offer a nearly identical card with better driver support for stereo and take a little bit more Money for that… should be an easy cashgrab…

Nevermind. So if i ve gotten it right, than all i have to do is modding my WorldtoClipspace Matrix in some way that everything is rendered in x = -1 to 0 instead of -1 to 1 for the left eye and in 0 to 1 for the right eye. If everthing is rendered I just swap buffers and the TV does the rest?

Yes, this is the simplicity of SBS; the TV takes care of stretching the left & right halves of the display and all the synchronization with 3D glasses.

Half-resolution also partially offsets the cost of rendering everything twice…

Thats nice. So I can still enjoy stereo rendering and wait until Nvidia and ATI start supporting quadbuffering on consumer graphics cards…

Thanks a lot for this Information. Cant wait to get my 3DTV :smiley: