3D Vision on linux / SteamOS

[Ray]

Hi all,

is anyone using 3D vision on linux?

I use ubuntu as my primary gaming platform and I think about getting a 3D screen and a 3D vison kit.

[DarkStarSword]

When I looked into it a couple of years ago it seemed like it was only possible with OpenGL applications that had native support for quad buffered stereo, and even then only on Quadro cards using the 3D Vision pro kit (this last part may no longer be true - not sure).

A big problem here is that 3D Vision Automatic only works with DirectX games, and games on Linux are all OpenGL (at least native ones, but I'd be very surprised if it worked with wine), so it would only work on ones that implement their own stereo renderer (and not VR stereo) and support quad buffered stereo. I suspect the total number of games that fulfil this could be counted on one hand, if there even are any.

nvidia has indicated that support for 3D Vision automatic is possible for OpenGL, but there hasn't been enough demand for them to justify spending the engineering time to make it work. I'm hopeful that the rise of Steam for Linux, SteamOS, etc will increase this demand, but given that they don't seem to spend much engineering time on 3D Vision for DirectX any more I can't see them spending it on OpenGL in the near future.

Game engines are starting to implement their own stereo renderers for VR, so maybe we will see some decent non-VR stereo support in the next few years, but given the maths to render stereo for VR is fundamentally different to stereo on a 3D screen I wouldn't count on them getting it right. If a Linux developer wanted to improve this situation I would suggest focussing on adding support to UE4 now that the source code is available (free as in beer) to hopefully get the support in some upcoming titles using that engine in the future. Other commercial engines are getting cheaper but are still largely closed (without handing over $$$), so those will be entirely reliant on other people. Open source engines would also be an attractive target to add support, but ultimately they are only used by a small number of games.

I have wondered if it might be possible to port Helifax' OpenGL wrapper to Linux, but that relies on a OpenGL DirectX interoperability layer in the driver and I have no idea if that is even present in nVidia's proprietry Linux driver. If not this specific wrapper than something along these lines from the community would be a good way to go, though unfortunately the existing community fixes for Windows DirectX games won't carry over to the Linux OpenGL ports as the shaders used with DirectX are different to those used in OpenGL.



If you have anything specific you would like me to test feel free to ask. I'm a Linux dev in my day job, but I long ago conceded that Windows would remain my gaming platform for the forseeable future so I haven't spent much time trying to get stereo to work in Linux.

[Ray]

Thanks for your answer.

I searched several forums and it seems to be still limited to Quadro cards.