3D Vision

It took something pretty special to get me to leave my precious CRT monitor and its ability to swap resolutions at will - but NVIDIA did it with 3D Vision. I just got it installed tonight and now I'm popping through my games to see how they look. Not all of them work all that well (and OpenGL games really don't work at all) but the ones that do…. it's downright insane! I just about cracked my jaw on the floor when the setup finished and it displayed some 3D screenshots!

I'm still having some trouble with 3D objects that are moving quickly but I think it's just a matter of my brain getting used to the 3D system. Some stuff does get weird. For instance, the emails in Alpha Protocol are bonkers - the panel with the text appears to be far away but the frame around the text looks to be at screen depth. Sometimes things appear to have different textures to each eye, too, which makes it impossible to focus. The Heaven demo does that a lot.

All in all, though, I'm extremely impressed. We can even take 3D screenshots!

P.S. First hardware I ever installed that required a medical test.

wow, that sounds really cool….. I have been woundering if it really works out in practice sounds like it did!

We can even take 3D screenshots!

Click to expand...

In that case why don't you post some

Easy enough to do, but you can't see them without some sort of 3D yourself. That's the curse of this technology. You can't really see it until you buy it and, when you buy it, you can't really show anybody. (Well, not unless somebody actually comes to see you personally, but who does that anymore? ) I'll give it a go, though.

Dragon Age works very well with this tech. Also, you can freeze battles and spin the camera around, which makes for good screenshotting.

Dalish Lake
Burning Wolf
Stick-in-the-eye

If you look carefully, you might see a problem with Dragon Age, too. For whatever strange reason, the character portraits don't always draw for the right eye. Shadows are sometimes a problem, too. Overall, though, the effect is just insane. That staff in the last picture appears to be about half way between my face and the monitor screen!

(If you've got 3D glasses, you can follow the links to ImageShack, right click, save the images, rename them to .jps, and double click on them to view them.)

FRAPS will let you take movies, too, and NVIDIA provides a 3D player. Check out how Lara pops out of the screen in the menu for Tomb Raider! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZNONHfZKQA
(How her HANDS pop out, that is - why are some of you snickering!?)

Not all games work great. Mount & Blade has too much 2D and 3D going on at the same time to really work very well, for instance. Though the battles might work OK. One nice thing about this technology is you can toggle it easily. If some part of a game isn't working well in 3D, just hit control-T (or whatever you set up) and it goes away. Hit it again and it comes back.

What monitor / HDTV do you have for your 3D glasses? I have a 52" HDTV its othervice great but not 3d capable.

With the new DS and new TV's you'll not need glasses anymore...... which is a big pro IMHO. I am just waiting until things will be like calls in the star wars movies

I'm using it as well. The monitor I've been using for that is a ViewSonic VX2265 and obviously the Nvidia glasses. 3D glasses are nice enough, you get 3 different rubber um…not sure how to call em but the part that of the glasses that sits on your nose. So you can adjust it to your face and make it even relatively comfortable if you have regular glasses underneath.

It is very impressive, and the fact you can adjust the depth of the effect is pretty useful too, as your brain and eyes get more used and comfortable with the increased depth.

Oh, as a side note I've been using them to play Dungeon & Dragon Online with team corwin and it's been working pretty good with that game. It works just fine with Drakensang and Torchlight is simply awesome with this. I didn't replay Dragon Age completly with the glasses but I did load my saved game at the landsmeet…it was pretty darn awesome with the camera angles changing, with the crowd and all.

Anyway, it works pretty well with most recent Direct3d games!

I'm using the ASUS VG236. $500 gets you the monitor plus the glasses. The monitor has to be able to do 120Hz *and* has to be able to sync up with the video card. Tons of monitors do the former but only a few do the latter. Brightness is also a big deal, given that you'll be wearing sunglasses while playing.

Tonight, I watched the last DVD for Lord of the Rings using a trial version of CyberLink's PowerDVD program. It has a feature that can take a 2D movie and add the third dimension in. How, I'm not real sure. The results are OK. Definitely not as good as a video game but OK.

You didn't get it dirty did you, whiney hobbit??

Time to revist this topic now that I'm older and wiser.

What you need for 3D Vision is changing fast.

On the NVIDIA side, you can look up all the requirements here. The monitor is the main issue for most folks as there are only about a dozen good ones to pick from. Projectors are supposed to work even better than LCD monitors. The big, new thing is the list of 3D TVs. I have *no* clue how well they work or if the drivers are ready for all of them but people are starting to post about watching 3D movies with them. (Real 3D, not the software-emulated kind I posted about above.)

ATI is finally getting in on the game, too, though they are doing it through third parties. I shudder to think how much finger pointing will be done when something goes wrong.

And things definitely DO go wrong. Often. Quite a few games work, quite a few games don't work, and quite a few games work in some situations but not others. We're starting to see companies actually patch games to work better, though. Batman AA, ArcaniA, and Starcraft 2 have done so. WoW seems to be doing some things but its a two-steps-forward-two-steps-back kind of thing right now.

There's been a lot of muttering on NVIDIA's boards of late regarding the compatibility list of games that work with S3D. The list is pretty good for games made in the last two or three years but often fails for games before that time. Games that are OpenGL or pre-DirectX9 are often listed as games that work well when, in fact, they do not work at all. It seems that these games were put on the list for an older 3D solution NVIDIA had back before 3D Vision came out and that older solution did support those games. Unfortunately, when they dropped support for older/OpenGL games, they didn't take the time to update the list so now they list off bunches of older games as working when they don't.

I'm still loving the technology, though, even with all its warts. When a game actually does work well, the effect is incredible. Especially once your eyes get accustomed to the technology so you can crank the depth up.

I have the Nvidia 3D vision glasses and all I got to say is that they are worth every penny for the monitor, glasses and new graphics card. Morrowind, Fallout, Stalker, Oblivion etc….never looked so good. They are not perfectly 3d as you'll sometimes get some objects that are doubled, but that is easily overlooked and you can adjust the setting on the glasses that helps get rid of those little flaws.

Plus they have their own 3D crosshairs. If you play a FPS the crosshairs will bother your eyes because they aren't using the 3D graphics, but if you disable them and use the one provided by Nvidia then that all changes and it looks perfect.

One thing I wish they could do is make it so I can play KOTOR in 3d, but that doesn't look like it's going to happen in the near future. I'm not as mad about it as some of the people in the forums because afterall those games were released awhile ago. I do not expect miracles from this device.

Yeah, now if we could just get some 3D pointers to go with the 3D crosshair. That's not so easy, though. I don't know any games that let you make the cursor vanish so the driver can handle it.

I've given up trying to make the first STALKER game do well in S3D - that sky is just too crazy for me. (Though I did pop it back on in a short, underground portion of the game.)

Call of Pripyat is the Stalker game I played in 3D and it works great. It still has your usual annoyances that come with all of the 3D games (the tech isn't exactly perfect yet ), but overall COP is one of the better 3D games I've played.

So far Morrowind is my favorite. It literally looked like the tables were coming out of the screen and I could pick up whatever was on with my hand. I do have trouble when it comes to targeting small items to pick up. It's not that big of a deal, but it is annoying at times.

I had this kit for a week and for me it is the next evolutionary step in graphics games. Equally important to the introduction of polygons. I invite all those who want to experience the future of the game to jump.

Eventually the porn industry is going to get into this technology. Think of the nasty looks you are going to get at the check-out counter if you wait to buy until then! If you buy now, they will just think you're a geek.

<S M I R K>

Really though, the technology is very much on the cutting edge. Unless you enjoy tinkering with new technology, I would wait until it's time to buy a new monitor. Of course, if you DO enjoy dinking around with game graphic settings and get a kick out of putting the glasses on upside down just to see what will happen - it's time to save up those pennies!