FAQs

Nvidia have dropped support for hardware and drivers that will allow stereoscopic view, so it is now very difficult to find suitable hardware. This feature is therefore deprecated from release 2021.1 onward and will be removed in a later release.

We do highly recommend installation of the latest graphical hardware drivers and OpenGL drivers to ensure optimal performance. These are often both available from your graphical hardware manufacturer’s website.

In order for Stereoscopic 3D viewing to function within Mercury your graphics hardware must support Quad Buffered OpenGL Stereo.

The development and testing of stereo viewing in Mercury was originally done on the following hardware configuration:

Stereographics CrystalEyes Workstation, with stereo glasses, E2 emitter and StereoEnabler.
Display card: NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400.

And has also been tested on the following hardware configuration:

Display card: Nvidia Quadro 410

Viewsonic V3D245 Stereo monitor with inbuilt emitter

Both Nvidia 3DVision and 3DVision2 glasses have been tested with this newer hardware combination.

For this setup, to enable stereo follow these steps with the NVIDIA Control Panel

1. Enable stereo 3D Under Stereoscopic 3D. This take you through testing the glasses and a few 3D images.
2. Under 3D Settings --> Manage 3D Settings. You need to change 3 settings:
   • "OpenGL rendering GPU" - Quadro 410
   • "Stereo - Display mode" - Generic active stereo (with NVIDIA 3d Visi...)
   • "Stereo - Enable" = On

However, we anticipate that the stereo display should work on any machines that support OpenGL quad-buffered stereo. If you try Mercury on machines with any other stereo display, we would appreciate receiving feedback to support@ccdc.cam.ac.uk on whether this is successful, so that we may inform other users of valid hardware configurations. On machines without appropriate hardware, the Stereo check-box will be disabled.