3D Vision Blog

Nvidia has just made available a new beta video driver in the form of 295.51 with some interesting new features and improvements regarding stereoscopic 3D support and not only. It is interesting to note that Nvidia has not released a WHQL driver for a while now, and the last such one is 285.58 back from October last year, but there have been multiple beta versions released in the meantime. Not everyone however installs and users beta drivers due to the fact that they may have some issues and not work properly at times or with specific setups, so have this in mind if you decide to try the new beta driver as well…

The most notable stereoscopic 3D-related new feature in the 295.51 beta drivers is the addition of support for 3D Vision windowed mode on 3D-capable DLP HDTVs and on “Optimized for GeForce” passive 3D monitors, so you will be able to run games and applications in stereo 3D mode in a window on these as well. Other than that there are quite a few updated or new 3D Vision game profiles, and these are:

- The Adventures of Tintin – rated Good
- Afterfall: Insanity – rated Fair
- Black Prophecy – rated Not Recommended
- Chaos Online – rated Fair
- Da Vinci Online – rated Fair
- DotA 2 – rating upgraded to Fair
- Dungeon and Dragons: Daggerdale – rated Fair
- Ferrari Project – rated Not Recommended
- The First Templar – rated Fair
- Fractal – rated Excellent
- FreeStyle 2 – rated Good
- The Haunted Halls Reach – rated Excellent
- King Arthur II – rated Not Recommended
- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning – rated Fair
- Kong Fu Ying Xiong – rated Fair
- Love Beat – rated Good
- Marvel Super Hero Squad Online – rated Good
- Microsoft Flight – rated Fair
- Perpetuum – rated Fair
- Post Apocalyptic Mayhem – rated Fair
- Prototype 2 – rated Fair
- Q.U.B.E. – rated Excellent
- Quan Qiu Shi Ming – rated Excellent
- rFactor 2 (mod mode) – rated Good
- Saints Row: The Third – Rated Not Recommended
- Shadow Company: Left for Dead – rated Not Recommended
- Special Force – Rated Good
- Tera – rated Good
- Top Gun: Hard Lock – rated Not Recommended
- Tropico 4 – rated Good
- Worms Blast – rated Good

A word of advice for the game Q.U.B.E. that is rated as excellent, the game kind of reminds of Portal in style and is actually quite fun and works really well in stereo 3D mode, however similarly to Portal the color palette in the game is often highly contrasting and this can lead to experiencing more crosstalk than usual. Also the new driver does add SLI profile for the upcoming game Mass Effect 3, but there is not yet a 3D Vision profile or rating for the game, and the previous games from the series had some issues in stereo 3D mode. Mass Effect 3 has the potential to turn out to be a great game to play in stereo 3D mode if it works properly this time, so hold your fingers crossed for when the game becomes available in March this year.

- To download and try the just released new GeForce 295.51 Beta video drivers …

It is a new year and the right time to prepare a short wishlist of new features and improvements that I would want to see implemented in 3D Vision this year. It is not like Nvidia is not working on 3D Vision by improving it and fixing issues, but they kind of miss implementing some small, but important things. As for AMD, they have just announced some new stereo 3D features in their latest preview drivers as well as with the upcoming Radeon HD 7970 GPUs, so let us first wait to see how, what and when they will deliver them…

- Bringing back the monitor size user selection that was available in the old stereoscopic drivers. 3D Vision is not longer used only on a certain size of 3D monitors, there are users that use large screen displays in the form of 3D HDTVs and even 3D DLP projectors and the available depth slider may provide insignificant depth levels for them. It is not like it has been completely removed as a feature, but the drivers detect it and save a value in the registry, thus there are workarounds for getting higher depth but why should it be hard when it could be made earier and more accessible.

- Providing a visual indicator for adjustment of convergence level, two simple lines that form a X could easily be used to provide a more user friendly guide on setting up the level of convergence by showing you the converging point. This one actually sounds easier that it actually is, but is something that should be very useful for novice users just starting with stereo 3D gaming.

- Saving stereo 3D screenshots in PNS (Stereo PNG) format by default and not some low quality JPS (Stereo JPEG) wuth a lot of compression, making them small in size, but with pretty bad quality and you need to edit the registry to either improve the quality or switch to PNS. It would’ve been much easier to just use the PNS format with no compression for best quality stereoscopic 3D screenshots, the file size won’t be that big anyway.

- Not deleting all your custom game profiles every time you install new video drivers. Something that is very annoying if you happen to forget to back them up by exporting the keys from the registry and then importing them again after you install new drivers. The driver installer could check for availability of custom game profiles saved by the user and offer the ability to preserve them in the new version as well.

- More options for advanced users to customize and create stereo 3D game profiles, so that they can share them with not so experienced users and help the stereo 3D gaming community that has grown quite a lot already. And not having to wait for official driver updates that are not released so often and not always contain profiles for all games that users want to be able to play well in stereo 3D mode. Of course sometimes the game just is a no go for stereo 3D, but there are rare occasions and with some tweaking most games can provide good results in stereo 3D mode.

You are also welcome to share what features you’d want to see in the new 3D Vision drivers this year from Nvidia in the comments below…

The updated version of the 27-inch Acer HN274H 3D monitor with the new 3D Vision 2 and support for 3D Lightboost technology is here as apparently Acer is already releasing the monitor on some markets and I just got a review sample. The new monitor looks exactly the same as the old version on the outside, even the model name on the front is printed as HN274H…

Looking at the back of the display reveals more interesting facts. Instead of Acer HN274HB the model name apparently remains HN274H, but with a slight difference in the version of the model only. So instead of HN274H bmiiid as the old model, the new model is labeled HN274H Bbmiiid with a part number ET.HH4HE.B04. The fact that the model number remains as HN274H and not HN274HB and the difference is in the version number only might be a bit confusing for a lot of people and it is not impossible that somebody can get the old model instead of the new one. So be careful when looking for the new version with 3D Vision 2 and 3D Lightboost support and wait for a review of the monitor very soon.