GeForce 3D Vision: Stereoscopic 3D From NVIDIA
by Derek Wilson on January 8, 2009 2:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The NVIDIA Experience, Look and Feel
Oh this is such a mixed bag. Much of this is going to be personal preference, so this feedback is mine combined with that of family and friends who came to check it out. I like numbers, but this really is more of an experience type of situation, and I'll do my best with it.
When it works it works really well and looks simply amazing. It's simple to adjust to a degree that is comfortable and doesn't cause huge amounts of eye strain. Because you do have to focus on objects at different depths, your eyes are working harder than when playing a normal game, and it forces you to do more looking at things rather than using your peripheral vision and just reacting like I often do when gaming. When it's done right (especially with out of screen effects) it fundamentally changes the experience in a very positive way.
But ...
In many games we tested there were some serious drawbacks. Even games that NVIDIA rated the experience as "excellent" we felt were subpar at best. Fallout 3 had some ghosting effects that we couldn't fix, and it just didn't feel right for example. Games with an excellent rating most of the time still require reducing some settings to a lower level like FarCry 2 where the lower quality shadows really take away from the experience. If anyone is going out of their way to buy a 120Hz LCD panel, a high end NVIDIA graphics card and a $200 bundle of active shutter glasses, they are not going to be happy when told to reduce any quality settings. But thats just how it is right now.
Other games, like Crysis Warhead, that received a rating of "good" were nothing if not unplayable with stereoscopic effects. Even turning shadows, shaders, postprocessing, and motion blur and using NVIDIA's stereo crosshairs didn't help when there was any fire, smoke, explosion, or water anywhere around. When those effects pop up (which is all the time) everything goes to hell and you can't focus on anything. It just destroys the experience and you get reduced image quality. A great package.
NVIDIA has said that they are still working with the profiles and with developers to help improve the experience. They have been and are trying to get developers to add stereo friendly effects to their games through patches, but that's just not in the budget for some studios. But NVIDIA needs to be more realistic with their rating systems. At this point, we would recommend taking a look at any game not rated excellent and just writing it off as something that won't offer a good experience. Then take the games rated excellent and assume you'll either have to disable some effects or live with some minor annoyance in a good many of them. For ratings to be taken seriously they need to be accurate and right now they are just not telling the right story.
RTS like Age of Empires or games with a 3/4 view tend to look the best to me. There is a fixed depth and you don't need to do lot of refocusing, but the 3D really grabs you. It actually looks a bit like one of my daughter's pop-up books, but infinitely cooler.
First person shooters are sort of hit and miss, as one of the best looking games was Left 4 Dead, but large outdoor environments like in Fallout 3 can degrade the experience because of the huge difference in actual depth contrasted by the lack of stereoscopic depth at extreme distances: you can only go so deep "into" or "out of" the monitor, and big worlds just aren't accommodated.
Simulation games can look pretty good and Race Driver GRID worked well. It would be nice to keep shadows and motion blur, but the tradeoff isn't bad here. The depth actually helped with judging when to start a turn and just how close other drivers really were.
The two effects that stand out the best right now are the out of screen effects in World of Warcraft and the volumetric smoke and lighting in Left 4 Dead. In L4D, fire the pistol real fast and you can see the smoke pouring out of the barrel curl around as if it were really floating there. Properly done stereoscopic volumetric effects and out of screen effects add an incredible level of realism that can't be overstated. Combining those and removing all problems while allowing maximum image quality would really be incredible. Unfortunately there isn't anything we tested that gave us this satisfaction.
We do also need to note that, while no one got an instant headache, everyone who tested our setup felt a little bit of eye strain and slight pressure between the eyes after as little as 15 minutes of play. One of our testers reported nausea following the gaming session, though she happens to suffer from motion sickness so this may have played a part in it. Of course, that's also very relevant information as no one wants to take dramamine before gaming.
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jkostans - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
So how is this different from my ELSA 3d shutter glasses from 1999? The glasses I paid $50 for back then are just as good as this $200 setup in 2009? Great job re-inventing the wheel and charging more for it nVIDIA.There is a reson shutter glasses didn't catch on. Ghosting being the worst problem, along with compatibility, loss of brightness/color accuracy, performance hits, the need for high refresh rate, etc etc etc.
If you are thinking of buying these, don't. You will use them for a few weeks, then just toss them in a drawer due to lack of game support and super annoying ghosting.
nubie - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
It is different because these are likely ~$400 - $500 quality glasses.Check out my setup with high resolution, no ghosting, high compatibility, minimal performance hit:
http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/StereoMonitorS...">http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/StereoMonitorS...
http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/3DMonitor">http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/3DMonitor
Running on iZ3D of course, no need for nVidia at all, buy any card you like, and keep running XP until Microsoft releases another OS worth spending money for.
jkostans - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
No ghosting?http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/3DMonitor#5060...">http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/3DMonitor#5060...
I can see it there and thats not even a high contrast situation.
Shutter glasses are shutter glasses, they all suck regardless of price.
nubie - Saturday, January 10, 2009 - link
OK have a closed mind, technology never advances.PS, that picture was taken through a linear polarized lens, and I am holding the camera and the glasses, so they may not have been lined up.
Also the contrast is automatically set by the camera, in person there isn't any ghosting.
Shadowdancer2009 - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Can they PLEASE kill this tech soon?It was 100% crap the first time, and it won't get better no matter how awesome the drivers are.
The glasses eat 50% of the brightness when "open" and doesn't kill 100% when "closed"
They never did, and your review says the same thing.
This was crap ten years ago, and it's crap now.
Give us dual screen highres VR goggles instead.
nubie - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Maybe you don't understand the technology, these are ~$400 - $500 glasses, wireless with about a week of li-ion battery power.Don't compare them to the $10 ones you can get anywhere, at least try them for yourself.
There are much better reasons to bash nVidia, like dropping support for 90% of the displays they used to support, and making support Vista only.
gehav - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
I'm perfectly satisfied with the current refresh rate of LCD-panels (60Hz). However what you forgot is the following: if the 3D glasses open and shut 60 times per second (for a 120Hz Panel) the old flicker of CRTs is effectively back. Therefore raising the refresh rate of the monitor to 240Hz would reduce the per eye flicker to an acceptable 120Hz. Not the monitor itself is the culprit here but the 3D glasses reintroduce flickering like in the old days of CRTs (and they are directly dependent on the refresh rate of the monitor).Georg
gehav - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
btw: 200Hz displays are already on the way, it seems:http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/02/sony-samsung-bo...">http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/02/sony...-both-cl...
gehav - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Just a thought I had while reading the article:Wouldn't a ray traced image work far better for stereoscopic viewing? From what I understand the rasterizing technique used by today's graphics cards uses all kinds of tricks and effects to create the perception of a "real 3D world". That's why the drivers have to be customized for every game.
Ray tracing uses a far simpler algorithm to get good results. Every light ray is calculated separately and every game that uses ray tracing should therefore - in principle - easily be customizable for stereoscopic viewing.
I'm thinking of the announced Intel Larrabee which will maybe offer ray tracing acceleration for games and could therefore be much better suited for stereoscopic viewing.
Not sure if I'm right with these thoughts but it would be interesting to see if games that are already available in a ray tracing version (like Quake 4) could be easily adapted to support stereoscopic viewing and what the result would look like.
Apart from that I also think we would need faster LCD-panels (240Hz) to get non-flickering pictures for each eye.
Georg
nubie - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Check out some of the other initiatives, notably iZ3D, who have offered a free driver for all AMD products and XP support (double check the nVidia support for XP, non-existent much?)nVidia's idea is too little, too expensive, too late. I have built my own dual-polarized passive rig that works great with $3 glasses, unfortunately nVidia has dropped all support (the last supported card is from the 7 series, so "gaming" isn't really an option.)
Thankfully iZ3D has stepped up to provide drivers, but thanks to nVidia's lack of support I have lost so much money on unsupported 8 series hardware that I haven't looked at a game in a couple years.
nVidia has killed my will to game. Dropping support of 3D is not the way to sell 3D (do some research, nvidia has dropped XP, supports only vista, and not even any of the cool displays you can cobble together yourself for less than the $200 this stupid package costs.)
My proof of concept, before nvidia pulled the plug:
http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/3DMonitor#">http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/3DMonitor#
My gaming rig, before nvidia dropped support for ~3 years:
http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/StereoMonitorS...">http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/StereoMonitorS...
nVidia needs to do better than this, and they should know better.