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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."
The glasses work great. Any direct3D will show in full 3D. The only reasons I don't wear them all the time (or ever really) are bad 3d driver support from nvidia in the past, and more importantly, every game I've ever played in 3D has used some weird visual shortcuts for displaying explosions or gunshots or something that breaks the whole immersion. For example, in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, it's all full 3D except the streetlights and headlights. Those appear to be painted on a 2D window in front of you because they don't really appear in the 3D space. Anyway, it's weird enough to make me not want to play it that way. So if this is going to ever work in the mainstream, game developers have to meet halfway and stop using graphical shortcuts like that.
I've got a Zalman monitor that does precisely that.
It's great. Unlike anaglyph, it doesn't suffer from ghosting and color problems. Unlike shutter glasses it doesn't require any special support: If you have the monitor, and the glasses, all that's needed is to produce a correctly formatted image. So it can work with any video card without specific support, and you can view 3D photos by just opening the image in the web browser.
The only disadvantage is that horizontal resolution is halved. But it's still much better than the other options.