3D Vision Blog

With the nearing of the official announcement of the new generation “Fermi” video cards NVidia continues to tease us, showing what they can do a bit by bit, this time we have a video demonstration. In the video above Tom Petersen Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia shows and describes how the performance of GeForce GTX 480 compares to existing solution (ATI Radeon HD 5870). Then highlights the different aspects of the benchmark and how the new GeForce GTX480 cards excel in tessellation, especially when there is more heavy processing needed. Tom also offers a quick peak at how 3D Vision Surround is pushing PC gaming forward at the end of the video by showing for a brief moment a working 3D Vision system with 3x Acer GD245HQ/GD235HZ displays connected to a SLI system with dual GTX480 video cards to enable the 3D Vision Surround.

You can say that in the last month Nvidia has been keeping pretty quiet regarding driver updates for its 3D Vision product line. One can say that this was due to the holidays and then the CES and this might as well be true. However it also seems that Nvidia has been working on some new and interesting features for 3D Vision that should be introduced pretty soon. So here are some bits of information on what to expect in the near future…

- 3D Vision Surround. This new mode will be introduced with the release of the new GF100 “Fermi” video cards based on the latest Nvidia GPUs. This mode will allow you to use up to 3 different 3D-ready monitors or projectors as one and in stereoscopic 3D mode. The application and games support here is still a bit questionable as this will introduce much wider resolution and will need more FOV, but we’ll have to wait and see how will these possible issues be addressed. With 3D Vision Surround you should be able to use up to three 120Hz displays with Full HD resolution in 12

- YouTube 3D for 3D Vision. YouTube has been working on adding stereoscopic 3D video support to their free online video service for a few months already. The required support for 3D Vision and frame sequential format was still lacking as it seems that adding it requires some new features. That is why a new version of Adobe Flash Player would most likely be required and such update is already been worked on… Nvidia has demonstrated a working beta of the YouTube 3D support during CES.

- 3D Gaming in a Window. Not this is very important, especially to all the people playing MMO games and willing to play them in Stereoscopic 3D. So far you could only use S3D mode not in a fullscreen mode only with Quadro and professional applications supporting Quad Buffer OpenGL. Being able to use games in S3D along with 2D applications in the same time would make it quite easier to do more wile playing on a bigger resolution screen and this is good with all these Full HD monitors coming out.

- 3D photo web browser plug-in. Another good thing is the option to view stereoscopic 3D photos directly from your browser of course if they are in the respective supported format. For that an additional plugin should be needed and it is supposed to be available for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Chrome.

Stay tuned for more as additional information about these upcoming 3D Vision features becomes available…

When ATI announced its Radeon HD 5×00 series GPUs and the new Eyefinity technology, allowing you to drive up to 3 independent monitors on a normal video card (up to 6 on a specialized one) a lot of people were thinking about how will it be if this could be applied into a stereoscopic 3D gaming setup with 3 displays (3D-capable projectors too!). And it seems that Nvidia wants to provide just that with its upcoming 3D Vision Surround, but unfortunately we are going to wait for Fermi in order for the technology to be formally announced although the good news is that it will not work only on the new GF100 GPUs (expected in Q1 this year), but 3D Vision Surround will also be supported on the GT200 family of GPUs that are currently available. So you might not need to buy a new card to use the technology, but on the current line of GPUs you might be limited to using only 2 displays and for 3 you’ll probably need a Fermi card. More details about 3D Vision Surround should be announced by Nvidia over the next few weeks…

If you happen to visit CES in the next few days you’ll be able to get a hands-on gaming experience with NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround which can be seen in NVIDIA booth in the South Hall 4 #35745, running on DepthQ HD 3D projectors and Acer GD245HQ 1080p LCD displays. Another new feature for 3D Vision that will be demonstrated by Nvidia during CES is a sneak peek of YouTube 3D, running on a 3D technology demonstration version of the Adobe Flash player that is viewable with NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses in full color. You’ll also be able to see the new Blu-ray 3D software players, including Arsoft’s TotalMedia Theatre 3 and Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra along with some Blu-ray 3D content, including 3D movie trailers for Disney’s Toy Story 3, A Christmas Carol, Alice in Wonderland, and more. So this year the Consumer Electronics Show will have a lot to show regarding the wide adoption of stereoscopic 3D technologies for gaming, movies and pictures and not only by Nvidia, but from a lot more companies too.