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 …

Lately we’ve been literally attacked with a lot of hit titles to play during the holiday season and more are constantly coming out from different game developers. And the GPU makers have been pressed a bit in releasing a lot of new driver updates with fixes and improvements to make things work as they should or to bring better performance for the gamers. And today comes a new beta driver for the owners of Nvidia-based video cards in the form of driver version 290.36, the first release from the R290 series of drivers. This beta driver brings some new features and a lot of fixes, but as usual I’ll focus on what is new regarding stereoscopic 3D support and you can find the full release notes here in PDF format should you be interested in all the details.

The new beta driver has an interesting new feature for 3D Vision, it adds support for 3D Vision over the native DisplayPort 1.1 connection available on the new BenQ XL2420T and BenQ XL2420TX monitors (supporting 3D Lightboost technology). These are apparently the first 3D Vision-ready 3D monitors with DisplayPort available, so Nvidia has also found a reason to add support for 3D Vision to work over DisplayPort as well. Previously DisplayPort was only used together with active adapters to convert it to Dual-Link DVI, mostly for output from laptops that did not have DL-DVI interface, but now you should be able to directly connect one of these BenQ 3D monitors and use it in 3D mode.

The new driver also comes with added or updated the following 3D Vision game profiles:

- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – rated Good
- Cang Sheng – rated Good
- Diablo 3 – rated Good
- Fei fei – rated Good
- Final Combat – rated Good
- L.A. Noire – updated rating to 3D Vision Ready
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 – rated Fair
- Qian Nv You Hun Online – rated Good
- QQ Xi You – rated Good
- Sonic Generations – rated Good
- Xian Tu – rated Good
- Yong Bing Tian Xia Online – rated Good

There are a lot of Asian games being added with a rating Good, L.A. Noire is apparently finally fixed, MW3 should also work better in 3D. There are also some specific fixes for 3D Vision, 3DTV Play and stereo 3D in various specific situations and hardware combinations that you can read about in the detailed release notes I’ve linked already. But based on the user experience from the first people that have installed the new beta drivers and the issues and complaints that some of them are having, especially in stereo 3D mode, I would not advice you to hurry and install the beta, you may wish to wait for the WHQL release. But if you do install the 290.36 beta, you are welcome to share your feedback in the comments below…

Nvidia has made available a new graphics beta driver version 285.27 available which introduces some new features and improvements for 3D Vision stereo 3D users. Nvidia is addressing one of the issues bothering quite a lot of 3D enthusiasts with high-end gaming systems, namely the lack of support for SLI configurations with some stereo 3D capabilities for 3D Vision, as in this driver there is now support for viewing 3DVisionLive.com and YouTube 3D with SLI PCs. However there is more work needed to be done in this aspect, because 3D Vision window mode still does not support SLI setups for stereo 3D games and applications, 3D Vision Photo Viewer, or the 3D Vision Video Player. So do not wonder why you may not see the option to activate the 3D window mode in the Nvidia Control Panel if you have SLI and it is active, you may need to disable the SLI for a while and then re-enable it after you finish using the window 3D mode. This is important to note as the stereo 3D window mode is now the default viewing option for the 3D Vision Photo Viewer software.

The new drivers also add the following 3D Vision game profiles: Aion, Diablo 3, Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) 2, From Dust, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, Last Remnant Benchmark, Men of War Assault Squad, Stock Car. They also update the 3D Vision game profile for Dirt 3 changing the rating of the game in stereo 3D mode to Excellent, so apparently the new driver gets rid of the issues the game had in stereo 3D mode. Unfortunately the rating of Diablo III is just good as apparently some objects render at wrong depth or incorrectly and DOTA 2 is even worse with a Not Recommended rating and these will be two very popular and widely played games, but you should apparently forget about playing them in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision for now.

- To download the new Nvidia graphics drivers version 285.27 Beta…