3D Vision Blog

Just yesterday I’ve shared the information that the game Just Cause 2 will be 3D Vision-ready title and today we already have the demo of the game available on Steam. The good news is that the demo also works just fine with 3D Vision, so you can get a feel of what to expect form the full game when it is out later this month, however there are a few issues that you should be aware of regarding the demo. The game really looks great in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision even with all the additional effects enabled so it is really done with S3D in mind, but the demo however has some minor issues. You should start with the installation the 3D Vision driver included in the just made available 196.75 drivers as these drivers are the first ones that do include a 3D Vision profile for the game. Not that if you use older driver without the game profile you’ll have some issues as the default convergence level in the game is just fine, it maybe needs just some fine tweaking for optimum results, but that also depends on personal preferences. If you have an SLI system with two or more Nvidia video cards you should disable the SLI before running the demo of the game if you plan to play it in stereo 3D mode as it seems that the demo has some issues with SLI and 3D Vision working together. With SLI enabled when you switch to stereoscopic 3D mode by enabling the 3D Vision the left frame in the game (right when taking a 3D screenshot) is almost completely dark creating a very weird feeling and making the S3D mode unusable until you disable SLI. The last thing you should be aware of is that the demo and probably the final game is quite demanding in terms of graphical performance, especially if you wish to play it in stereoscopic 3D mode.

- To download the demo of the game Just Cause 2 over Steam…

The Multiplayer Demo of scheduled for February 16th release game Aliens vs Predator has been released yesterday over Steam and a lot of people (including myself) tried to play it with 3D Vision. It turned out however that the 3D Vision drivers contain a profile for an older AvP game and load it and that results in totally messing up the image on the screen when you turn on the stereoscopic 3D mode. Turns out that the convergence level is the thing that totally messes up the image on the screen, but even after lowering the convergence with the help of CTRL + F5 key combination the game is not in a true stereo 3D mode…

So I had to figure a way out to fix that by preventing the wrong game profile to be loaded from the 3D Vision driver and this was not as easy as to just rename the AvP.exe file from the Steam directory as this prevents the game from actually being run. So the solution I’ve found is to rename the actual game executable from AvP.exe to AvPx.exe and then add a small launcher that is named AvP.exe that is just calling up the renamed actual game executable file and that did the trick. The 3D Vision drivers no longer detect the game and load the old profile so things look normal, although you might still want to play with settings in order to get best results in S3D mode. To make it easier I’ve packaged the launcher I’m using (Bart’s program launcher 1.2) into a small archive so that after renaming the the original Exe of the game you can just extract the files from the archive below and then just run the game with everything working fine with 3D Vision.

- Download the archive with the launcher fix for the AvP Multiplayer Demo…

The Saboteur is a third person action-adventure video game set during World War II. In it you’ll be able to explore an open world Nazi-occupied Paris and some of the countryside and parts of Germany. The primary missions you’ll get all revolve around exacting revenge on high-ranking German officers and officials, and getting to the point to be able to exact vengeance because these damn Nazis killed on of your friends and got you angry. The game has an interesting atmosphere and features and you can consider it to be quite fun to play with some nice elements, but unfortunately it does not do very well if you try to play it in stereo 3D mode…

You should start with the Options menu of the game launcher before starting the game itself in stereoscopic 3D, because you have to be certain of a few things in order not to have surprisingly strange results. Make sure that the Refresh Rate is set at 60Hz, otherwise if you set 120Hz you’ll be forced in a low resolution, using the sixty hertz in the option is Ok, the game actually runs in 120Hz so the S3D works. Also disabling shadows can help you minimize a bit of the strange looking effects (defects) while you play the game. As for the resolution and detail level you should set them according to the specifications of your PC. Have in mind though that the game is actually quite heavy when playing in stereoscopic 3D mode and you can get some stuttering because of the framerate dropping too much when you are in a big open space. An example would be having 58 frames per second in normal 3D, but when I activate the S3D mode in a big open space it drops down to about 15 fps on Core i5 750 and GTX 275 with high detail and 1680×1050 resolution. So you might want to consider lowering the resolution or decreasing a bit the detail level in order to have at least 25-30 fps minimum framerate, otherwise it will ruin your fun playing the game.

Still when you run the game you can notice that there are some weird looking lights and the objects around lights might also look strange and have issues, especially if you increase the depth level more. So a custom convergence level is needed in order to get rid of the different light conditions for the left and right frame and so I did create a custom profile to help you with that. The screenshot above is with my custom settings, also notice that the frame rate is just 22 frames with the maximum details – this was just done while testing the game for S3D, not for playing it, so I needed to lower some of the detail levels to get better performance afterwards. I’ve provided the REG file with my custom convergence settings below, as usual you can download it and import the version for your operating system (32-bit/64-bit) and then just run the game and it will be auto loaded. Have in mind that in order to use this profile with best results you need to lower the depth level to the minimum, otherwise you’ll still have weird lit areas… so turning down the depth level wheel all the way down is needed. And as usual please share your experience using the custom convergence profile if you try it out…

- If you want to order the game The Saboteur for PC, you can do so here…
- Download my custom 3D Vision convergence settings for the game The Saboteur…