3D Vision Blog

Nvidia and Epic Games just announced the addition of official support for the stereoscopic 3D technology called 3D Vision in the latest Unreal Engine 3. This announcement means that licensees of the UT3 game engine will be able to take full advantage of integrated 3D Vision support by offering games that not only look great, but also handle very well when played in stereoscopic 3D mode. The best news is that even the popular Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free version of Unreal Engine 3, will also offer support for 3D Vision. The updated version of Unreal Engine 3 and UDK (the march beta does not include it!) will be available in the near future, allowing games developed with that revision (or later one) to deliver “out of the box” support for 3D Vision. Meanwhile the latest version of UT3 engine with 3D Vision support is being demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference currently held in San Francisco, so if you are interested you can visit and see a demo of the engine in stereoscopic 3D mode. And while the announcement is only about 3D Vision support for the latest UT3 engine it will most likely work without any significant issues with other stereoscopic 3D solutions currently available.

- To visit the official website of the free UDK (the free UT3 engine development kit)…

The game Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic is a sequel to the popular submarine simulation series. In this game you’ll be behind the periscope of a German Type VII U-boat with the goal to attack the Allied Forces in different famous battles across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. in the fifth game you can finally relive the life of a submarine captain from a first-person view completely controlling the crew and the U-boat. You can say that this game is a must for every submarine simulator fan and the good news is that you can take the level of realism even further by playing the game in stereoscopic 3D mode with the help of 3D Vision…

However as of the moment there is still no official profile for the game available in the 3D Vision driver and you need to tweak the convergence by hand in order for the game to be playable in stereo 3D mode. Of course I’ve prepared custom convergence settings that can help you skip the part where you have to find the right settings by yourself, you can download the file from the link below. You should also disable the Environmental Effects from the game Options menu for best results as when they are active you may notice some weird visual defects in stereo 3D, for example in the water waves around the submarine. If shadows look weird and annoy you inside the submarine you may also want to lower them from the Options until they seem comfortable or completely disable them. Also have in mind that during the cutscenes the stereoscopic 3D effect seems to be gone, although they do not seem to be pre-rendered movies, but after they end it is back again. Increasing brightness a bit might help you in night missions when everything is already dark as the active shutter glasses make these scenes seem even darker. As usual please let me know how these settings work for you in the comments below.

- To download the custom convergence settings for Silent Hunter 5…

We’ve been waiting for Nvidia for over a month to release a new standalone 3D Vision driver with profiles for new top games, but there is still nothing available, even as a beta version. Nvidia however released a new driver for graphic cards version 196.75 that also included an updated 3D Vision driver with the same version, but this one only supported 3D Vision Discover mode… and soon after that this driver was recalled and removed from the website because some issues (not in the 3D Vision part, but in the GPU driver!). So I repacked the 3D Vision driver version 196.75 with the IR Transmitter USB driver that was originally not present and here you can download the full package and install on your PC while waiting for the official updated release (the 3D Vision driver provided is completely safe to use!). And as you can see above this driver has profile even for the recently announced 3D Vision Ready title Just Cause 2 that also works with the just released demo of the game. Besides the Just Cause 2 profile you can also see other 3D Vision-ready titles such as the quite expected Metro 2033 game. And if you are wondering what that Biohazard 5 game is, well nothing new actually as this is the name under which the Resident Evil 5 is actually known as in Japan, so no big news there. The 3D Vision driver 196.75 also includes official profiles for games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and even correctly recongizes the new Aliens vs Predator game that had issues with older versions of the driver (loaded a profile for older AvP game that messes up things). Have in mind however that even though there is a profile for the new AvP it is being rated as Not Recommended for 3D Vision because of the 2D flashlight and other lights being rendered at wrong depth levels (need a path for the game to fix that).

But the interesting things in the new version 196.75 of the 3D Vision driver don’t end up with only new profiles for games, there are also seem to be other new additions. If you remember back in January I told you about some new expected features in 3D Vision and Nvidia seem to be adding some of these already. Like for example the 3D Vision plugin for Mozilla Firefox (npnv3dv.dll) you get installed or the one for Internet Explorer (Nv3DVisionIePlugin.dll and Nv3DVisionIePlugin64.dll) as these are supposed to allow you to view stereoscopic 3D photo pairs directly from within your browser. However I could not make them work, as I’m not even sure how they are supposed to be working anyway… there is still no any information officially available for them… yet. Anyway, if you are eager to get the repackaged 3D Vision standalone driver version 196.75 you can download it from one of the links below. Then you need to extract the Zip archive and run the setup.exe to complete the installation, if you get a prompt for the USB drivers for the IR transmitter you can select the folder where you extracted the driver (32-bit and 64-bit versions are included).

- To download the standalone 3D Vision Driver 196.75 – mirror 1 – mirror 2 – mirror 3