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

Summary

When and if Crane group faces their 3D software changes to depend on libraries not part of CentOS6, or they come up to the end-of-support for CentOS6 (November 30, 2020), the group will need to replace their 3D cards, and possibly emitters and monitors. Currently (10/2016), that comes to over $1,000 each workstation, minimum. (It's $800 just for each card; see below for details.)

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