Need for Speed: SHIFT is finally out and it is a bit better and a bit more fun than the previous game from the NFS series, which is good, but this ain’t the topic for this post as I want to focus more not on the game itself (I personally liked it), but on its 3D Vision compatibility and what to expect if you want to play the game in S3D mode…
When you start the game you’ll notice that even the in-game menus are rendered double (without wearing the glasses) which would’ve been Ok if they were 3D, but they are not so there is no point in that. Anyway, when you have a view of your car in the background of the menu it is looking better with the text, but if it is only a text and 2D images they do not have any depth.
When you actually start the race in your car things will look pretty good in stereoscopic 3D mode, but in no way perfect with the reason being that the convergence level is a bit messed up (there is no official profile yet in 3D Vision drivers for the game!). The car interior (when looked from inside) and the car when looked from outside looks pretty good in S3D (use the key F to switch the camera), but the objects that are closest to you displayed at the level of the monitor “glass” are way too separated. This makes the speed meter and the text for your position and even the back mirror unusable (unreadable), so you need to do a bit of convergence adjustment in order to fix that. And by pressing the key C you can just hide this additional info and the problem will be gone, but that is just a temporary solution and not that good one, because you actually need this additional data.
What you need to do is to adjust the convergence level manually (you need to enable the advanced key options from the control panel in order to be able to do that). You can use the onscreen text as a reference for adjustment, as it needs to be set as the two images (for left and for right eye) to overlap the letters, making the text easily readable. The easiest way to do that is to just take off the glasses as it usually is when adjusting the convergence level and achieve the same result as on the image above. After you adjust convergence yourself or import the preset levels I’ve already prepared in the archive below (just import the reg file on your PC) you’ll also be able to increase a bit the depth level than the previously possible, but with NFS: SHIFT you can’t go to much higher levels of depth without getting ghosting too apparent.
Now, you should know that the game is still not perfect in Stereoscopic 3D mode even after you adjust the convergence level for better results. There is another problem that appears and you’ll see it as a weird brighter vertical lines on the left and on the right side of the screen, with them getting wider and wider as you increase the depth level. This is somewhat a problem from the game engine, because there brighter areas are rendered in each of the frames, on the left in the left frame and on the right on the frame for the right eye. In order to get rid of that too you’ll have to resort to the function called Cycle frustum adjustment from the advanced in-game settings (they need to be enabled), so just press the CTRL + F11 until the image gets a bit stretched, but the weird lines are gone. And so, after a bit of tweaking you can start to really enjoy playing the NFS: SHIFT in Stereoscopic 3D…
- Get the game Need for Speed: Shift here if you don’t have it yet…
- Download Custom Convergence Settings for Need For Speed SHIFT…
