Info to remember about the current 3D hardware and its limitations

Summary

Summer 2016: ChemIT staff successfully upgraded the Crane 3D workstations to bring them up to a supported operating system. However, IT staff ran into many, many technical problems, detailed below. The new set-up, with CentOS 6 should last several years, but if something major must be done, the Crane group should expect to buy new hardware. Catalyst for change include:

• Crane group's 3D software changing to depend on libraries not part of CentOS 6.
• Current CentOS 6 comes up to the end-of-support date, November 30, 2020.
• Other reasons not predicted.

New hardware includes at a minimum the 3D cards, and possibly emitters and monitors. Currently (10/2016), costs are estimated at over $1,000 for each workstation, minimum. (It's $800 just for each card; see below for details.) Currently the group has 4 3D workstations, including one in Crane's office. If demand remains low, may be fine to go to just 2 3D workstations. Cost estimate does not include the cost of new workstations themselves, which got replaced this summer.

Details

• On linux (of any distro) it is necessary to have a Quadro FX Nvidia card with a 3 pin DIN connector. Crane group uses "stereoscopic" 3D.
  
  • Non-Quadro cards and Quadro cards that support 3D under Windows, but do not have the connector (such as the Quadro M2000), will not work under Linux.
    • This makes the cheapest new card at the time of writing (10/2016)  the Quadro m4000 at $799.99.
  • Intel and AMD do provide"stereoscopic" 3D capabilities. However, they have full-feature drivers for Windows only. Their drivers for Linux are not 3D-capable. Really!
• For the current Quadro cards, as a result of NVIDIA not updating drivers (except for security patches) for legacy cards they will NOT work under CentOS 7 running GNOME or any other distribution of GNOME beyond GNOME 3.8 (as compositing is now a part of the environment that cannot be removed).
  • Switching to a different desktop environment from GNOME should let the cards run under CentOS7 as long as the new desktop environment has compositing turned off by default or offers the option of disabling compositing (LXDE and XFCE are viable alternatives at time of writing).
• Crane group uses "coot" software. It doesn't seem to be updated very often, so hopefully its dependencies won't change anytime soon.

We believe, but have not tested and confirmed, that new video cards (as described above) should work with the current IR emitters and monitors.

See also