3D Vision Blog

Following up on the story about the Roxio Cineplayer BD With 3D not being available anymore and the fact that there remain only three software Blu-ray 3D-capable players I’ve decided to check the current situation with them as well. I often get questions if somebody would be able to watch 3D movies on his old PC or laptop on a new 3D HDTV, something that seems easy at first, but things may get problematic depending on what is the video card in the system. The problem is that not all software Blu-ray 3D players support every popular 3D output mode and not output modes are available for all output formats.

Below you can find the requirements for playback of 3D videos on HDMI 1.4 3D HDTVs with the different solutions for playing back Blu-ray 3D movies, these are as per the website of the software developers requirements and specifications published on their websites… and they are not that clear.

Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5
- NVIDIA GeForce 200/100 Series (Mobile/Desktop) or newer
- AMD (ATI) HD 5000 series or newer
- Intel G45(?) or newer

Corel WinDVD 11 Pro
- NVIDIA GeForce 500/400/300/200/100/9 series/8 series or newer
- AMD Radeon HD 6000 series or newer
- Intel H5x series or newer

Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 Pro/Ultra
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or newer
- AMD Radeon HD 6800 series or newer
- 2nd generation Intel Core processors with Integrated Graphics

So if you have a system with these specifications as a minimum (the specific GPU depending on the manufacturer), in theory you should not have trouble playing Blu-ray 3D movies on a 3D-capable HDTV using HDMI 1.4 frame packaging. These software solutions of course also support Nvidia 3D Vision, 3D DLP Checkerboard and Row Interleaved (passive 3D), Anaglyph and maybe a few extra ones and with them things are generally easier to setup and they simply work. The real problem is making things work using HDMI 1.4 frame packaging and it might turn to be more problematic, in my experience, to make an integrated Intel GPU work, so as a good advice I’d recommend to download the trial version of the three software Blu-ray 3D players mentioned above and try them all on your PC before deciding which one you should buy. This can save you a lot of trouble in actually making thing work as you want them to and not having to rely only on some requirements listed by the software developer as practice tends to show that these not always turn out to be true or things simply don’t work as you expect them to. Also, another good advice is to always use the latest official video drivers and to have all the updates for the player software as these do help in resolving some issues, although in some rare occasions they also might break compatibility.

It seems that there is a strange misconception going on around that since passive 3D monitors use only half of the vertical resolution for displaying the frame for each eye you are supposed to get higher fps in a game. But this is far from the truth, because even though each frame for each eye displayed with a resolution of 1920×540 on a passive 3D display is actually still rendered in 1920×1080 resolution and then the extra lines are being discarded. As a result you have the same performance requirements for rendering the stereoscopic 3D image on either passive 3D or active 3D monitor, even though you are getting a bit lower resolution on the passive 3D solutions when viewing the result.

Rendering at Full HD resolution on passive 3D solution allows you for example to save stereoscopic 3D screenshots or 3D video from a game with full resolution, though this might not work on all stereoscopic 3D solutions. It also allows you to get better quality of the image without having to resort to very performance taxing solutions for anti-aliasing as lowering the vertical resolution can lead to more jagged edges. Using the extra visual information that has already been rendered can help process the stereoscopic 3D image that is going to be displayed, so that it will look better, even though the extra vertical lines from each frame are still being discarded. That does not help much when you have very small details or small text displayed using passive 3D setup, but still can help improve the overall visual quality without much of a performance loss. In the end you can expect to get pretty much the same number of FPS on the same system running either a passive 3D display or an active 3D solution for gaming in stereoscopic 3D mode. Actually with passive you can be getting a bit less fps due to the extra processing of the images before they are being displayed on the screen, but the difference is very small, so you will hardly notice it.

The latest TriDef 3D 5.2 (Ignition 3.5.6) software has introduced another interesting new feature that I kind of missed at first and you might’ve as well – the “Shift One Eye” feature. It is something that you might want to play with a bit to see if it will work well for you and that may depend a lot from one person to another.

Traditionally, 3D is produced by shifting the camera viewpoint to the left of centre for one eye, and to the right for the other. With Shift One Eye turned on, the camera will remain in the central position for one of the views, and be shifted to the left or right for the other. This is great for first-person shooters, for example, as it allows you to use the game’s inbuilt aiming system.

The Dominant Eye setting can be used to specify which of your eyes is dominant (this eye will see the unshifted view). According to various sources (listed on Wikipedia) around two thirds of the population is right eye dominant, so we’ve used that as the default setting.

When using Power 3D mode, shifting one eye also improves performance. It’s for this reason that Shift One Eye is turned on automatically if Power 3D Quality is set to “Medium” or “Low”.

In order to be able to test the new feature you need to run a game from within TriDef 3D Ignition, then call up the OSD menu (default key for that is Numpad 0), navigate to the Output menu and turn on the “Shift One Eye” feature, and you can also change which is your dominant eye – Left or Right.

- To download the latest TriDef 3D 5.2 software with the Shift One Eye feature…