3D Vision Blog

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is celebrating its one-month anniversary and Blizzard has announced that the first feature and balance patch for the game should be completed and available by the middle of September. Patch 1.1 will contain a number of improvements including additional mod features, Editor improvements and bug fixes, some custom game improvements, support for NVIDIA’s 3D Vision, and more… And I’m pretty sure that most of you are expecting especially the 3D Vision support part, although StarCraft II already looks quite well in stereo 3D mode with the latest beta 3D Vision drivers. However the official patch 1.1 should fix all of the remaining small things like 2D crosshair along with other HUD elements rendered in 2D and maybe some other glitches that the game has when rendered in stereo 3D mode. So maybe in two weeks time StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will become an official 3D Vision Ready game title.

- To read all of the available details about the upcoming StarCraft II patch 1.1…

The game Lost Planet 2 is an upcoming 3D vision Ready title and now there is an official benchmark that supports DirectX 11 and is also 3D Vision Ready as the game itself, allowing you to try see how your current PC will be able to handle the game and what to expect in terms of stereoscopic 3D. The game has been practically released for console gamers, but the PC version that will have the advanced features like stereo 3D and DirectX 11 support is scheduled for a release on October 12th in North America and October 15th in Europe, so the benchmark is just on time to give you an idea on what to expect. Unfortunately I’m currently unable to try the benchmark in 3D mode and/or to do some benchmarks regarding the performance, so I would ask you to share some results and your comments how well it runs in 3D mode.

- To download an try the Lost Planet 2 DX11 and 3D Vision Ready Benchmark…

Today the demo of the anticipated Mafia 2 game was made available to the general public with the full game becoming available a bit later this month – August 24th in North America and 27th in Europe. Mafia II takes advantage of Nvidia’s PhysX technology and is going to be a 3D Vision Ready title, working well also with triple monitor 3D Vision Surround setups. What you need to we bell aware of is the fact that the game is quite demanding in terms of graphic power needed if you want to play it with maximum detail level and PhysX set to high, let alone in stereo 3D mode on top of that. The recommended to have GPU is a GTX 260 without using PhysX and 3D Vision and for more you better have a Fermi-based video card ready and SLI with at least 460s would be good to have in order to crank up the PhysX level and play in stereo 3D mode with comfortable framerates. For 3D Vision Surround Nvidia recommends you to have GTX 480 in SLI and an optional dedicated for PhysX graphics card which may be a bit overkill just for a single game, but Mafia II might as well turn out to be “the game” that is worth upgrading your PC for. I’m not yet sure how well it will work on ATI-based GPUs, but then again there you will miss the additiona details provided by the PhysX support along with most likely no stereo 3D mode support, although you might still have some options for that.

The demo for the game is available on Steam and it includes support for bot PhysX (off, medium and high modes) as well as 3D Vision, so it can give you an idea on what to expect from the full game when it comes out. There is also a heavy benchmark mode that can show you a bit disappointing framerates even on hig-end configurations, because there is a lot of physical calculations going on in the scenes rendered in the benchmark and with PhysX set to high you’ll be out for a surprise, especially if you test in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision even on GTX 480. Anyway, you better try the demo yourself, it is available now, than to just read impressions from it, just be prepared that you might finally need an upgrade for your PC to fully enjoy the game. Below you’ll also find some screenshots in stereo 3D mode that I’ve took inside the demo of Mafia 2, they are in 1680×1050 resolution, with maximum details, AA on (2x SSAA only) and PhysX set to High, so you can get an idea on what to expect. You may notice a bit of ghosting in specific scenes (it is a monitor-related issue, and not the game being responsible), but in overall the game looks great in stereo 3D as expected from a 3D Vision Ready title.

- Download Mafia II 3D Screenshots – mirror 1 – mirror 2 – mirror 3 – mirror 4 – mirror 5