GeForce 3D Vision: Stereoscopic 3D From NVIDIA

The NVIDIA Experience, Look and Feel

Oh this is such a mixed bag. Much of this is going to be personal preference, so this feedback is mine combined with that of family and friends who came to check it out. I like numbers, but this really is more of an experience type of situation, and I'll do my best with it.

When it works it works really well and looks simply amazing. It's simple to adjust to a degree that is comfortable and doesn't cause huge amounts of eye strain. Because you do have to focus on objects at different depths, your eyes are working harder than when playing a normal game, and it forces you to do more looking at things rather than using your peripheral vision and just reacting like I often do when gaming. When it's done right (especially with out of screen effects) it fundamentally changes the experience in a very positive way.

But ...

In many games we tested there were some serious drawbacks. Even games that NVIDIA rated the experience as "excellent" we felt were subpar at best. Fallout 3 had some ghosting effects that we couldn't fix, and it just didn't feel right for example. Games with an excellent rating most of the time still require reducing some settings to a lower level like FarCry 2 where the lower quality shadows really take away from the experience. If anyone is going out of their way to buy a 120Hz LCD panel, a high end NVIDIA graphics card and a $200 bundle of active shutter glasses, they are not going to be happy when told to reduce any quality settings. But thats just how it is right now.

Other games, like Crysis Warhead, that received a rating of "good" were nothing if not unplayable with stereoscopic effects. Even turning shadows, shaders, postprocessing, and motion blur and using NVIDIA's stereo crosshairs didn't help when there was any fire, smoke, explosion, or water anywhere around. When those effects pop up (which is all the time) everything goes to hell and you can't focus on anything. It just destroys the experience and you get reduced image quality. A great package.

NVIDIA has said that they are still working with the profiles and with developers to help improve the experience. They have been and are trying to get developers to add stereo friendly effects to their games through patches, but that's just not in the budget for some studios. But NVIDIA needs to be more realistic with their rating systems. At this point, we would recommend taking a look at any game not rated excellent and just writing it off as something that won't offer a good experience. Then take the games rated excellent and assume you'll either have to disable some effects or live with some minor annoyance in a good many of them. For ratings to be taken seriously they need to be accurate and right now they are just not telling the right story.

RTS like Age of Empires or games with a 3/4 view tend to look the best to me. There is a fixed depth and you don't need to do lot of refocusing, but the 3D really grabs you. It actually looks a bit like one of my daughter's pop-up books, but infinitely cooler.

First person shooters are sort of hit and miss, as one of the best looking games was Left 4 Dead, but large outdoor environments like in Fallout 3 can degrade the experience because of the huge difference in actual depth contrasted by the lack of stereoscopic depth at extreme distances: you can only go so deep "into" or "out of" the monitor, and big worlds just aren't accommodated.

Simulation games can look pretty good and Race Driver GRID worked well. It would be nice to keep shadows and motion blur, but the tradeoff isn't bad here. The depth actually helped with judging when to start a turn and just how close other drivers really were.

The two effects that stand out the best right now are the out of screen effects in World of Warcraft and the volumetric smoke and lighting in Left 4 Dead. In L4D, fire the pistol real fast and you can see the smoke pouring out of the barrel curl around as if it were really floating there. Properly done stereoscopic volumetric effects and out of screen effects add an incredible level of realism that can't be overstated. Combining those and removing all problems while allowing maximum image quality would really be incredible. Unfortunately there isn't anything we tested that gave us this satisfaction.

We do also need to note that, while no one got an instant headache, everyone who tested our setup felt a little bit of eye strain and slight pressure between the eyes after as little as 15 minutes of play. One of our testers reported nausea following the gaming session, though she happens to suffer from motion sickness so this may have played a part in it. Of course, that's also very relevant information as no one wants to take dramamine before gaming.