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NVIDIA Launches 3D Vision 2
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA just announced their next generation of 3D Vision technology that claims to deliver greater realism and immersion for 3D games, movies and photos. 3D Vision 2 is very similar to NVIDIA's original 3D Vision. The technology is backwards compatible with NVIDIA's first gen 3D emitter technology. However, NVIDIA has made a number of physical and technical tweaks that enhance the technology in a few key ways. NVIDIA's active-shutter glasses have been redesigned with 20% larger lenses and the company has worked with partners to bring new, larger, full-HD 3D Vision compatible monitors to market. NVIDIA has also developed a new technology dubbed LightBoost that ultimately results in brighter on-screen imagery and better environmental lighting characteristics in 3D content as well."
Games are one place where 3D actually makes a huge difference. The information is already there in the graphics card, fully, so it can process it much more better than in movies. I used to play Left4Dead and Left4Dead2 with the NVIDIAs tools with 3D glasses and the game was MUCH more scarier and cooler. I suggest you try it... it's really a completely different and better experience. It works extremely well for scary and FPS games, but I can see it could be strategically used in RTS games too.
Hey movie studios! You need LightBoost on your 3D movies!
I'm tired of the dark screens, and I'm boycotting 3D until you do something about it.
Create Open3D so that all makers are in.
They already have that. It is called OpenGL
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I use to use the Nvidia Stereo driver for Microsoft Flight Sim occassionally and they were nothing but a royal PAIN. You had to match the 3D Stereo driver version to the main graphics driver version, but they only put out the Stereo driver for a select few versions. So if there was a bug with your graphics card or a particular game on the lastest compatible main driver you were stuck with that main driver for ages (like a year or more). You could upgrade the driver but if you did you lost the 3D. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. In the end it wasn't worth it and I gave up.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's really absurd the level to which the vendors have hosed shutter glasses scene up. I'm a veteran of many compatibility horror scenes, and this one is truly up there with some of the best. There are tens of flavors of glasses protocols, and many "universal" glasses that don't even have manual tuning options, which you will need, because even if the protocol works, the actual lens timings that result will be off from where they really need to be. Meanwhile lots of consumers are sitting around watching ghost-riddled images thinking they just bought a crummy TV, when many of the TVs are just fine if used with properly tuned glasses. Not to mention for the few guests you may have who just cannot abide 3D, I haven't even seen a pair that will allow them to watch one-eye.
Anyway I decided at the beginning of the whole thing that I was not going to give any of the TV manufactures any money for their lock-in technology, and would stick to universal offerings. Right now I'm biding my time to see how the (eventually to be released) XPAND X104s stack up against the BitCauldron -based universal IR-to-RF gear. Both of those at least you can tune. Meanwhile I've had to hack a JP-1 remote control and a phototransistor to translate from my TV's protocol to another protocol so that my cheapo universal glasses use the right duty cycle for my set, since they don't when set to the "correct" protocol. Go figure.
Color me skeptical when I see news articles about vendors cooperating to develop a standard -- my guess is they'll manufacture products that actually use it for about a year, then go back to creating more churn to suck the dollars out of our pockets.
Someone had to do it.
Actually, OpenGL was designed with that in mind. It allows you to render to separate left and right colour buffers. That's the only thing an API really needs to support stereoscopy.
True enough.
I have to give Nvidia credit, though - They and they alone brought us 120hz LCDs.
Before that, if you wanted *anything* over 60hz, you had to go with a smallish screen. Now? 1920x1080 monitors with 120hz!
I have one, and I really like it. It makes lots of stuff feel smoother, including the mouse cursor.
There is no support for stereo in Direct3D, so NVidia exposes its own api to do that (ATI too).
Basically you put a double image in the main buffer, with an additional line containing some parameters, and they take care of displaying that correctly.
OpenGL has a standard mechanism to do that, named quad buffering, but ATI and NVidia enable it in their professional cards only.
So you can have standard stereo-vision in OpenGL using 3d vision glasses, if you have a Quadro card it works well (and no need to be fullscreen contrary to their direct3d solution). If you have a GeForce you cannot do it (or maybe you can if you tweak a firmware in order to pretend to be a Quadro).
Only Microsoft can decide to add stereo vision in direct3d, but if they do it I am not sure NVidia and ATI will like it...
"I won't be a rock'n'roll star. I will be a legend." Freddie Mercury
Well, if they are glossy, hopefully at the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Piled right in with 3D glasses...