For those of us doing profesional work 3d work, there has always been a compromise of using 3d quad buffered stereo or using the pretty, but functional composite extensions. Starting with the Nvidia 337 series drivers, Nvidia has finally implemented composite support with quad buffered stereo. Sadly in order to use it requires a stereo-aware composite manager. It is my understanding kwin is not a stereo aware composite as it does not use the GLX_EXT_stereo_tree extension. More about the GLX_EXT_stereo_tree extension specification can be found at: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/glx_stereo_tree.txt . Reproducible: Always
We probably need someone with experience in this area to implement it. My system neither has that extension nor any software which uses stereo buffering.
Andy Ritger of nvidia sent me the following email about gnome's progress and where I could get the patches. Maybe this might be of help for whoever might implement this in kwin. Owen Taylor at RedHat is currently working on updating gnome/mutter to be stereo-aware. Those patches are here: https://git.gnome.org/browse/cogl/log/?h=wip/quadbuffer-stereo https://git.gnome.org/browse/clutter/log/?h=wip/quadbuffer-stereo https://git.gnome.org/browse/mutter/log/?h=wip/quadbuffer-stereo https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=wip/quadbuffer-stereo
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733277 Is the gnome bug that follows the implementation of quad-buffer stereo support.
I have pushed a branch that adds support for stereoscopic 3D and GLX_EXT_stereo_tree to my kwin repository. Unfortunately I don't have a 3D-capable monitor, so I'm hoping that you will be able to test it and let me know if it works. To check out the branch, type: git clone git://anongit.kde.org/clones/kwin/fredrik/kwin.git cd kwin git checkout origin/stereo-5.1 More instructions for building KDE applications can be found at: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Building_An_Existing_Application The branch is based on the current stable branch (Plasma/5.1) to make it easier to test. Your distribution should hopefully have packages for all build dependencies. After starting this version of kwin there should be a new checkbox in the compositing settings for enabling stereoscopic 3D (disabled by default). I should also add a warning that this code has not been tested at all, so there is a chance that it could fail rather spectacularly.
Wayland has no concept of stereo buffers, and X11 is feature frozen. Also, as far as I know, we haven't received that many bug reports about missing support for stereo buffers, so I'm going to close this bug report.