VMD 1.8 Windows Release Notes

Windows Installation Notes:

• VMD requires a pentium class machine with approximately 32MB of RAM, and 16-bit color video as a minimally useful configuration. The use of an OpenGL hardware accelerated video card is highly recommended.
• In order to achieve hardware accelerated 3-D rendering, your video board must have an "OpenGL ICD" type video driver. Once you have an appropriate driver, you may need to set the board it to a particular video mode in order to enable the hardware acceleration features. The instructions that come with the video driver should mention what modes are fully accelerated. You can retrieve current OpenGL drivers for many video boards (for Win9x) by using the GLSetup utility.
• Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 2000 installations should be trivial. Windows 98/NT/2000 ship with all necessary software components.
• Windows 95 users MUST have Winsock2 and OpenGL installed on their machines in order to run VMD.
  • Download Winsock2 for Win95
  • Download OpenGL 1.1 for Win95

Stereoscopic Display Information

• VMD supports quad-buffered frame sequential stereo rendering. Specific information on setting up stereo on PC's can be found among the several links from the web site below. Many of the low-end stereo solutions are not currently capable of working within VMD, but we have are evaluating adding such support into VMD. The web sites below contain good discussions of the hardware and software compatibility issues for stereo, particularly for PC's running Windows.
• Scitech GLDirect
• Stereo3D.com
• Stereographics.com

Hardware 3-D video accelerators tested with VMD

• List of video boards and setup options for best VMD performance
• A list of 3-D accelerators that have stereo sync outputs

Windows 95/98/NT/2000 OpenGL info at other sites:

• GLSetup, a new automated OpenGL setup utility for Win98
• List of 3D accelerators with full OpenGL drivers (www.opengl.org)
• SciTech GLDirect OpenGL translator for boards that support DirectX 6.x