NVIDIA's 3D Vision February 18, 2009 Brandon Sandman Bell

3D Vision Review

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One topic we see a lot of is 3D. Whether its 3D glasses or 3D displays, that’s another popular subject that pops up every year or so in our inbox.

If you’re like us, when you hear the words “3D” and “glasses” together in a sentence, your first instinct is to roll your eyes and let out a large chuckle. We’ve all seen the the cheap paper glasses you get for free at the movie theater, and we all know of numerous companies that have tried and failed to make 3D a reality. Heck, many of NVIDIA’s own board partners are on that list. Back in the Riva TNT days FiringSquad/Gamers.com veteran Tim Hsu (Timmus!) took a look at ELSA’s 3D Revelator glasses, ultimately finding mixed results in games, and the ASUS VR100 glasses were crippled by poor driver support and ASUS’ insistence that they only be used with ASUS graphics cards – back then ASUS was very new to the graphics scene, and as such their cards weren’t as popular as they’ve become today. Wicked3D’s eyeSCREAM were also popular back in the days.

More recently NVIDIA has partnered with companies like iZ3D and Zalman to bring 3D touting displays to market. The idea here is NVIDIA provides the GeForce hardware and graphics driver, while iZ3D and Zalman provide the LCD display and 3D glasses. The problem has been price: iZ3D’s first 3D LCD launched with a price tag over $1,000, considerably more than comparable 22” displays, and the poor 2D display quality and limited 1680x1050 resolution made iZ3D’s first foray into 3D displays a pretty forgettable experience. (Today the price on iZ3D’s display has come down to $399 and the company is working heavily with ATI, offering all Radeon card owners a $50 mail-in rebate on the purchase of an iZ3D monitor.)

Zalman, best known for their CPU/GPU coolers and cases, just got into the 3D display game with 19” and 22” monitors, but their displays have received rather tepid reviews so far.

Even LCD heavyweight Sharp got into the 3D display space at one point, pitching their 3D monitors towards gamers and the professional workstation market. That went over like a lead balloon.

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How 3D Vision works

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For everything to seem fluid to your eyes, a lot has to happen behind the scenes. For starters, the lenses in the 3D glasses have to be capable of flicking on and off multiple times per second, while the monitor itself must support a high refresh rate in order to eliminate headache-inducing flicker. This is why NVIDIA requires a 120Hz display for 3D Vision: 60Hz are dedicated to each eye.

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3D Vision displays

As we mentioned above, you’ll need a 120Hz capable display for 3D Vision to work. As of right now there are two LCDs on the market that fit that description, Samsung’s SyncMaster 2233RZ, and the ViewSonic FuHzion VX2265wm. Both displays are 22” with a max resolution of 1680x1050, 5ms typical response time, and MSRPs of $399, with the FuHzion VX2265wm sporting a contrast ratio of 1000:1 (typ), while the Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ’s contrast ratio goes up to 20000:1.

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3D Vision hardware and accessories

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The hardware

The glasses themselves seem to be very well built, and look considerably better than stereoscopic glasses we’ve seen in the past. While you certainly won’t confuse them for a pair of Oakleys, you won’t feel like a complete idiot when putting them on either.

How do they feel on the face? Pretty comfortable actually. As we mentioned above, in addition to the standard nosepiece, NVIDIA provides two additional nosepieces for users with smaller or larger heads. The nosepiece itself isn’t hard plastic either, so it won’t bite at your nose during extended gaming sessions. The back of the glasses curve inward, putting a little bit of pressure on the back of your head, but it isn’t any worse than other glasses with this design.

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3D Vision gaming impressions

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Setting it all up

Once you’ve got the hardware all setup, the software install is pretty seamless. A handy wizard walks you through the graphics driver installation, as well as the stereoscopic 3D driver install, then you simply put on the glasses and follow a few prompts to properly setup the glasses. Here we should mention that 3D Vision support is limited exclusively to Windows Vista, NVIDIA doesn’t provide stereoscopic 3D Vision drivers for Windows XP.

From start to finish the whole process should take just a few minutes, NVIDIA really deserves kudos for how seamlessly they’ve set everything up. This is important, as the next topic, game compatibility, requires heavy involvement on NVIDIA’s part.

Gaming with 3D Vision

One downside to 3D Vision is that it’s so new that games haven’t been designed to take advantage of it. To get around this, NVIDIA has created 3D Vision profiles for most of today’s latest games. These profiles work much like NVIDIA’s SLI profiles, automatically detecting the game’s .exe and setting up the stereoscopic effects appropriately for that game. NVIDIA says that 3D Vision works with over 350 games and applications, with a complete list of supported games here.

If you follow the link you’ll see that NVIDIA provides a rating for each 3D Vision-ready game, with games rated “excellent” supposedly delivering the very best experience, with additional ratings of “good” and “fair”.

The problem is, since the games weren’t designed with 3D Vision in mind, even many of the games rated excellent must have their eye candy effects reduced in order for 3D Vision to work properly. Often times you’ll have to turn off shadows and advanced lighting effects. Motion blur is another popular effect you also have to disable in some games. In addition, in multiple shooters you’ll also have to turn off the default crosshair and use NVIDIA’s 3D crosshair, otherwise you’ll see two crosshairs.

Fortunately, one benefit of profiling hundreds of games is NVIDIA knows in advance what graphics settings cause problems in specific games and offers suggestions on what settings you should use for the best 3D Vision experience. These suggestions pop up automatically in the bottom right corner of the game you’re playing and can be toggled on or off.

So does 3D Vision actually work? Yes and no. Under ideal circumstances, the experience can be jaw-dropping, with some games sporting pop-out effects where game objects like explosions, billboards, and other items appear to literally pop outside of the screen.

In other cases there are visual glitches and quirks that are downright annoying. We should also note that games universally look darker behind the 3D Vision glasses when compared against the traditional monitor, requiring you to crank up the brightness to offset this.

Because the experience can literally vary from game to game, we’ve provided the following breakdown, including NVIDIA’s official ratings and notes on what settings to use, with our thoughts providing subjective analysis of how the various games look and feel with 3D Vision enabled:

Call of Duty: World At War

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: N/A (unfortunately our Direct2Drive version of WaW wasn’t picked up correctly, so the notes didn’t work but 3D certainly did.)

FiringSquad’s thoughts: We had a lot of fun with World At War. Unlike some of the other games tested, we were able to crank up the 3D depth within just a minute or two of playing the game. One item that was a bit disorienting however was text. Like previous CoD games, text pops up in World at War ID’ing friendly NPCs (Sgt Smith, Cpl Brown, etc, etc), not to mention prompting you when you need to reload. Because of the 3D effect, this text sometimes appears as if it’s over the NPCs (or even enemies) instead of to the side of them which can throw you off when multiple things are going on at once.

Unfortunately, spent cartridges from your gun don’t pop out of the screen, but you do feel as if you could reach out and catch each one of them if you wanted! Another really immersive moment is looking down sniper scopes, as well as manning turrents where your sights appear to line up dimensionally in front of your intended target.

World at War deserves its excellent rating. After Left 4 Dead, this was our second favorite 3D Vision title.

Call of Duty 4

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Turn off Glow and DOF

FiringSquad’s thoughts: Considering how immersive World at War looked with 3D Vision, we were surprised by the lack of depth from Call of Duty 4. Sure, many (but not all) of the same scenarios that looked best in World at War also allowed 3D Vision to shine in CoD 4, but for whatever reason it just wasn’t as compelling.

Other than the sniper level, where you spend a large amount of time looking down your scope, 3D Vision was pretty underwhelming. Fortunately, since it’s based on an older game engine, you don’t have to make too many compromises visually to get 3D Vision working with CoD 4.

Crysis

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Good
NVIDIA Notes: N/A

FiringSquad’s thoughts: No matter what we tried we couldn’t get this game to work with 3D Vision. Half the time when we’d load Crysis we’d get a blank screen, but the system had not crashed. We have no clue how this game obtained a rating of “good”.

Fallout 3

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Use NVIDIA Crosshair

FiringSquad’s thoughts: We noticed weird artifacts in Fallout 3. The area where the clouds and sky met had a strange moiré like effect on them. It looked as if 3D Vision was trying to add depth to the clouds, placing them in front of the sky, but the moiré pattern just threw everything off.

Everywhere else, 3D Vision ran well.

Far Cry 2

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Set Post Effects to low, Set Shadows to medium Turn off Bloom

FiringSquad’s thoughts: Unfortunately in order for 3D Vision to work in Far Cry 2, you have to run the game in DX9 mode and turn off many of the effects that make the game look so good. Even then, the game’s fire just doesn’t look right with 3D Vision, smoke and water also seem off.

When compared against Far Cry 2 running with very high visual settings in DX10, the compromises required for 3D Vision in addition to the glitches add up to a subpar experience. You’re best off disabling 3D Vision for Far Cry 2.

Left 4 Dead

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Clouds at wrong depth setting, film grain to off provides better stereo effect

FiringSquad’s thoughts: Once you’ve seen Left 4 Dead in 3D Vision, it’s tough to go back to playing the game without it. Words really can’t describe how incredibly cool Left 4 Dead looks with 3D Vision. From the way blood splatters against the screen when you take damage, to the way smoke from your pistols seems to hover in the air in front of you, 3D Vision takes a very dated Source game engine in Left 4 Dead and turns it into a graphical masterpiece. This is easily one of the most impressive things we’ve seen in the last few years.

Mirror’s Edge

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Good
NVIDIA Notes: Incorrect reflections, self shadows render incorrectly, light halos are 2D, use NVIDIA lasersight

FiringSquad’s thoughts: To be honest, we were pretty disappointed by this title, especially considering NVIDIA’s efforts with EA/DICE and PhysX. Based on this, we assumed they worked heavily with them on 3D Vision as well, but this obviously isn’t the case. As NVIDIA’s own notes indicate, many items are rendered poorly, and we saw ghosting and other issues. Good is probably overstating the 3D Vision implementation in Mirror’s Edge.

You’re going to need a pretty powerful graphics setup in order to run 3D Vision with fluid frame rates. This is because the technology comes with a pretty significant performance hit. How significant? Check out the benchmarks on the next page….

3D Vision Performance

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To test the performance hit 3D Vision brings to the table, we setup a Core i7-965 Extreme Edition testbed with 3GB RAM, Windows Vista 64-bit, and NVIDIA’s 216-core GeForce GTX 260 and 9800 GTX+. Let’s look at the results:

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As you can see, enabling 3D Vision slashes performance roughly in half for the GeForce 9800 GTX+ and GeForce GTX 260. The single GeForce 9800 GTX+ configuration is unplayable in every game except perhaps Left 4 Dead, in our opinion you’ll need a pair of 9800 GTX+ cards to deliver acceptable performance with 3D Vision. The GTX 260 is also barely able to average playable frame rates in World at War, Left 4 Dead, and Fallout 3.

Going from one card to two for SLI brings performance up quite a bit, but the SLI 3D Vision setups still frequently fall behind the single card equivalent setup running with 3D Vision turned off: the single GeForce GTX 260 card with 3D Vision off outran the GTX 260 SLI 3D Vision rig in World at War and Fallout 3, while performance was dead even in Left 4 Dead.

Conclusion

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At a bare minimum, you’ll need the glasses, which sell for $200. Depending on whether or not you have a CRT capable of delivering refresh rates above 100Hz, you may also need a 120Hz LCD from Samsung or ViewSonic. According to their PRs, these monitors sell for $399. You can also buy them bundled together direct from nvidia.com for $598. Once you’ve got the monitor and glasses in place, you’ll then need a powerful graphics subsystem in order to deliver high frame rates. In addition, in some games you’ll also need to turn down some graphics settings in order to get 3D Vision to work properly.

Alternatively, you could take that same $200 and buy yourself a GTX 260 card, or the $600 and get a pair of 260s for SLI and still have money left over. By going this route you’ll get more performance and won’t have to compromise on graphics settings. Unlike 3D Vision your card will also work properly with all titles – at this moment 3D Vision only seems to shine in a handful of games.

With all that being said, we hope NVIDIA doesn’t give up on 3D Vision. Again, we strongly believe that given more time, this could be a really important product for NVIDIA in the future. If they’re able to produce more games with the quality of Left 4 Dead, 3D Vision could be a real game changer for the company.

NVIDIA says this is already in the works with games currently in development. This means we’ll see more games with out of screen effects and other jaw droppers.

Considering their history with SLI profiles, we have no reason to doubt that NVIDIA’s developer relations team can make this happen with profiles and built-in support for 3D Vision. Besides Intel, if anyone’s got the resources to pull this off, it’s NVIDIA.

Besides support from game developers, NVIDIA’s also going to need a wider variety of LCDs capable of running 3D Vision, as well as cheaper display offerings: $400 is too much to pay for a 1680x1050 display.

In our opinion, the glasses themselves also need to hit the $99 price mark as quickly as possible.

Once the 3D Vision glasses can hit the sub-$100 mark, and there’s a wider variety of cheaper 120Hz displays out there, 3D Vision can begin to take off. We see no reason why this tech couldn’t be as significant to NVIDIA as other initiatives such as SLI and PhysX. After all, 3D Vision helps NVIDIA sell more GeForce GPUs, and has the added benefit of locking users into the GeForce ecosystem once they purchase the glasses.

We’ll probably need to revisit 3D Vision a year or so from now to see how the tech is progressing. Hopefully by then we’ll see more games with quality levels as high as Left 4 Dead (Spore and World of Warcraft are supposed to look pretty good with 3D Vision), while prices will hopefully be low enough for more consumers to stomach. That's the hope at least, we'll see if it pans out...