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NVIDIA Offers 3D Glasses For the Masses
Vigile writes "A new stereoscopic 3D gaming technology has hit the street today from NVIDIA, though demoed earlier in the year, that promises to bring high quality 3D gaming to the PC. The GeForce 3D Vision technology utilizes active shutter glasses and a 120 Hz display (either 120 Hz LCD or 3D-Ready DLP TVs) to bring an immersive 3D effect to PC games. Using the depth buffer information stored in DirectX, the NVIDIA software is able to construct a stereo 3D image out of existing game content while the 120 Hz requirement gives each eye 60 frames of motion per second negating the physical detriments that were known to occur with previous 3D offerings. The review at PC Perspective details how the technology works, the performance hit your games take while using it and the advantages and disadvantages to the user's gaming experience with 3D Vision."
My Asus GeForce 2 shipped with a pair of shutter glasses. The darn things did frak' all on the pack-in game. (Soldier of Fortune) I pretty much tried them out once, then stuck 'em into storage. Shutter glasses are highly overrated.
If manufacturers really want 3D gaming with true depth perception, monitor and GPU manufacturers should work together to create polarized computer monitors. Simply turn on the 3D effect, put on a pair of stylish shades with mismatched lenses, and BAMMO! Instant 3D.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
But a new and more likely useful implementation. First off it's wireless which makes them much more practical for general use. The big deal these days is the faster monitors. Back when they first came out, you had to use them CRTs, LCDs were too slow. However even good CRTs had real hell doing refresh rates high enough not to produce severe flicker. 85Hz was fine for a normal image, too slow for this sort of thing to work well. It took a top of the line CRT to do 120Hz at even 1024x768.
Well that's not a problem now. DLP screens update way, waaaaaay, faster. They cycle colours thousands of times per second. So doing 120Hz, or rather 60Hz per eye, is no problem at all.
Nothing revolutionary, but it is practical now. I remember playing with it when it first came out. It was kinda cool, but not all that usable and only really worked when I tried it on a professional CRT at work. This sounds like I could make it work in my living room on a normal DLP screen.
Welp, to answer my own question, it looks like it does not. That's a shame, as the only game I really play is ETQW.
To understand why this may be a poor choice for 3D glasses technology for consumers, as well as some thoughts on why NVIDIA might have gone with it anyways, here's an article that gets into the nitty gritty. Brief summary; headaches and batteries.
(Insert usual disclaimer about the Inquirer not exactly being an enthusiastic supporter of NVIDIA here..)
I've owned and used heavily 2 stereoscopic 3d systems.
One used a large CRT monitor that could run at 150Hz. I had two different 3d shutter glasses I used. I remember having to do quite a bit of tweaking with each game I wanted to play, but eventually I was able to get 'perfect' effects that were completely and totally awesome.
You can't really know til you try it, but 3d can make games feel dramatically more real. It can make even older games look a LOT better. Deus Ex was pretty darn awesome looking when your weapons actually have depth to them, and so do the enemies.
I then built a passive stereoscopic rig using polarized glasses and 2 LCD monitors, as well as a half-silvered mirror. Total cost : about $650. That one also ruled, and worked better than the shutter glasses. I found that the killer app game for it was World of Warcraft.
This was 18 months ago : I was playing WoW in full 3d. I had to disable just 1 effect to get it to work perfectly, all of the time, smooth as glass. Again, a lot of the graphics of that game look amazing when they have depth, because your brain automatically fills in details that aren't really in the low detail graphics.
Why did I quit? Time, and the fact that Nvidia basically abandoned stereo 3d for a while. My 8800GT did not work at all for a long time. Stereo 3d IS worth it, but it requires heavy driver support or it doesn't work.
Also, I never could eliminate "ghosting". That is where the images from one eye leak into the other. One game in particular, a horror game, was AWESOME and VASTLY more scary with depth. The problem was, the dark shadows and flashlights would create various halos on the screen from ghosting which was very unrealistic and distracting.
Ghosting is inherent to shutter glasses. The only 3d tech that completely eliminates it is a headset with a separate display for each eye. However, no affordable, high resolution headsets are available on the market today. (and when I say affordable, I mean for any reasonable price. You cannot get a high resolution head mounted display for even $2000)
These aren't the kind of video glasses that display the image right in front of each eye - these are shutter glasses that alternately black out the left and right sides, synchronized with your monitor that's alternately showing right and left images.
So if you're walking around instead of looking at your monitor, unless the real world is blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, it'll just look a little dimmer. And if the real world *is* blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, you've found Owsley's Secret Lost Acid Stash... let me help you with that :-)
(My first question when reading the headline about new 3D glasses was to wonder what resolution they are, since I'm not happy reading text at less than 800x600, and most gamer glasses have been 640x200 or less, , but of course they don't work for that either, so no gargoyle mode for me yet.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think this is fixed nowadays, with most developers no longer using sprites for steam, explosions, etc.
And you would be wrong. Most games still use a lot of alpha blending effects (smoke, halos, hair, windows, etc.). The problem with using the depth buffer for depth/3D position extrapolation is that alphas don't Z-Write, so the alpha pixels will pick up the same depth as what ever solid geometry is behind it. This is the same problem that plages other post processing effects such as depth of field, depth buffer based motion blur etc...
If I am reading things correctly, this should work with Mirror's Edge, no mod required.
Display Hz is independent of fps.
Zalman TRIMON ZM-M220W
Nvidia fucked over the consumer with these.
I've had a pair of shutter glasses (as have a hell of a lot of other people) for years. For years, I was a fan of Nvidia because they included shutter support in an add-on driver release. I played Portal with my original-series VRStandard glasses and it was AMAZING.
Six months ago, Nvidia entered into a monetary partnership with people who make some shitty, half-assed "3d compatible" lcd monitors. All of a sudden, the latest version of the add-on driver (a) is Vista-Only (fucking bullshit) and (b) dropped support for anything but anaglyph, these "3d compatible lcd monitors", or "official Nvidia shutter glasses."
I'm not about to infect my computer with the Vista Virus to have this, much less have to go spend money on buying more new hardware that, internally, is exactly the fucking same as I already own except for having the monitor-sync bit use a different one of the 14 VGA pins to hide its left/right signal.
Fuck Nvidia till they start putting the consumer first again. And if they don't fix this and give us back the driver support, then I won't buy their cards anymore.
This isn't a "review", this is a paid-for advert disguised as one.
A few examples:
Active glasses for stereo 3D viewing are not a technology created by NVIDIA and in fact they have been around for some time as well. However, the quality of the glasses and the user experience has been low due to low frame rates (30 Hz to each eye usually) and bulky hardware.
Reality: Existing glasses solutions (from companies like EDimensional and preceding them, VRStandard) are just as slim as the NVidia offering and run at the same framerate (100-120 Hz).
As of today, NVIDIA's 3D technology will work with only two types of displays: true 120 Hz LCD monitors and 3D-Ready DLP projection televisions.
That's only because Nvidia has a monetary interest in forcing people to buy new hardware; the old glasses solutions worked just fine with true 120-Hz monitors, DLP projection TV's, and even standard CRT monitors until recently when Nvidia deliberately broke the drivers and made 3D-support only available on Windows Vista.
I feel it is also important to realize that while the 3D effects we are seeing today are really cool and well worth the investment of $199,
A pair of EDimensional glasses six months ago ran you $60-80 depending on where you bought them, and were exactly the same technology inside; all NVidia's done is changed which pin they're hiding the monitor/glasses sync signal in on the video cable. Charging $200 is fucking highway robbery and they know it.
It's a pity that "PC Perspective" ran a shitty, paid-for "review" and are trying to fool everyone. I call Scam because I see one.