NVIDIA Offers 3D Glasses For the Masses 261
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."
And for those of us without 20/20 vision? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Retinal Projection (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:New? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Accessories? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that when we are walking around all day seeing in 3d, we can focus on things at different distances by flexing the lenses of our eyes.
In a 3d movie, everything is at the same focal length (the distance from your eyes to the screen) regardless of how far away it appears to be.
That's going to cause some degree of eye strain no matter what.
60 still hertz (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, except that some of us can still see the 60Hz flicker. I want to gouge my eyes out looking at anything less than 75Hz, which would work out to 150Hz combined for this technology.
Re:Accessories? (Score:3, Insightful)
I even get headaches when playing Far Cry 2 longer than 10 minutes. Reason is that the view is all the time swinging littlebit. My brains register that movement but because I am not moving but staying still, I get headache. Only game what I am suffering from this. Not even the legendary Aliens Versus Predator (1 & 2) did not give this when playing as Alien and running all over places with fullspeed and going 360Â all the time. Far Cry 2 is bad game for me because of that. I wanna find the option to turn off that "realism" effect because it really add realistic feeling about that game ;-)
Re:I have the older glasses (Score:5, Insightful)
Any Direct3D application will look good and 3D. However, there is a flaw . While it will show the pixels adjusted for each eye, the occlusion testing is only done once. That is, your right eye cannot see slightly around a barrel, or both eyes will perceive you rounding a corner at the same time.
It's not worth it to use until these devices become mainstream, or have reached a pricepoint where they can become so easily. Then they will rush to do so.
They always do. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did I quit? Time, and the fact that Nvidia basically abandoned stereo 3d for a while.
That's the problem. They always do. 3D glasses have been in and out of favour with manufacturers for years and years. They keep trying it, and then giving up. Maybe it's just too invasive to require people to use special glasses, but for whatever reason it never seems to catch on.
I remember that the Sega system had 3D glasses. I think there were about 2 games for them. I even bought (and still have) a pair for my Amiga computer. I literally only ever used them with the demo game that came with them. Nothing else was available, as far as I could tell.
Even earlier, stereoscopic movies were made in the 50's. It also turned out to be nothing but a passing fad.
I think stereoscopic vision adds a really cool level of detail to the 3D experience. Combine it with head tracking for *truly* impressive results. But unless the industry gets its act together and actually produces games and applications that use them, this technology will forever be doomed to last about a week and then disappear.
Maybe this time around it will be different: At least at this point we have many more games and applications that are actually rendered in 3D, which is a significant difference from the state of computing circa 1995. And the level of detail and realism in 3D rendering has increased dramatically. We also have operating systems that fully utilize 3D technology for day-to-day interaction, which might have interesting uses for depth perception.
Also, from a consumer point of view the glasses themselves seem to be quite a bit more stylish and less bulky, which should help quite a bit.
For those who say these will induce headaches: when I had the old glasses for the Amiga they refreshed at 30 Hz, alternating with the interlaced scanlines of the monitor display. Heck even just staring at a 30 Hz monitor without glasses will give you a headache. If these really update at 120 Hz, I don't think headaches will be a problem.
Re:Gaming? (Score:1, Insightful)
Girlfriend = 3D Porn
Re:I have the older glasses (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not worth it to use until these devices become mainstream, or have reached a pricepoint where they can become so easily. Then they will rush to do so.
Yeah. The same stupid argument, that's used all the time. It's not worth to create games for 3d-glasses, until they become mainstream. And it's not worth to create 3d-glasses, until there are enough games for it. How stupid are those arguments?
In reality, there only ever will be 3d-glasses and games using them, when someone creates them anyway. No matter if they are actually needed right now.
For example: It's pretty easy to create a game that just watches out not to create problems with 3d-glasses that behave as if there were two screens. As long as there aren't, I would not cost the game developer much, if anything, be backwards compatible to one-screen systems, and they could put a nice sticker on the box, saying "compatible with 3d-glasses".
Wait until one or two big engines (like the unreal engine) support this, and a ton of following games will support it.
Next you know, some Taiwanese company throws cheap glasses for specific cards on the market. nVidia smells the cash and creates them too. And from then, it works.
Of course, now, nVidia went the hard way, and created the glasses first. I just hope they work with many games...
Re:Uh oh (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't need glasses and a computer for that in some places.
Just to Clarify, 120Hz != 120 FPS (Score:2, Insightful)
However, 120 Hz doesn't mean you need your game to render at 120 FPS. It simply means you need to be able to display 120 images per second (60 per eye per second). Most likely, the implementation will involve using two frame buffers in the video card instead of one. The video card will render one frame for each eye, at whatever pace it can sustain. This rendering process will be decoupled from the display subsystem, which will simply have to switch to display the proper image for each eye at the right time. If the video card can't render at 120 FPS, then the video card can simply alternate between the same pair of left-right images until a new pair of images is done rendering.
Anyways, this is just speculation, but obviously, while 120 FPS is hard to maintain constantly on modern games, 60+ FPS will be more feasible. Some people might also be willing to reduce their display resolution so they can get a good enough frame rate for 3D play to be comfortable.
Re:Further taking RTFA apart (Score:3, Insightful)
The old drivers are tagged to only work with their accompanying driver version. When they went to the 170 driver series, they screwed us over.
You can't run the base 170 driver series with the 160-series stereo support driver, and newer games are going to require the 170 driver series. Functionally, people who've bought Nvidia for years and been loyal customers are being cynically dicked over.