3D Vision Blog

About a month ago the new Radeon HD 7970 GPUs were revealed by AMD as the must have solution for gamers willing to have a really powerful next generation video card in their system. And a bit earlier than that AMD has released a Catalyst Preview driver 12.1 announcing some new and exciting features for gamers. Both of these also came with some very interesting promises for gamers interested in stereoscopic 3D as well, such as multi-gpu CrossfireX support in stereo 3D mode, HDMI 1.4a 30Hz 3D mode on supported hardware, 60Hz 3D mode support over HDMI, Eyefinity setups with active stereoscopic 3D monitors.

So the question that many gamers interested in playing their favorite game titles in stereoscopic 3D mode were asking themselves (and me too) is if they should buy a new video card based on the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPUs. And while a lot of people may be really tempted in pulling the trigger on a Radeon HD 7970 for stereoscopic 3D gaming platform, I would strongly suggest to wait a bit more and not to be in a hurry. There are a lot of things that we are now expecting from AMD, but they are apparently not in a hurry to deliver them, especially after the release of the HD 7970 that yet again brings some architectural changes and probably way too many features for the company to quickly bring them to the users. It has been about a month already since the official announcement of the Radeon HD 7970 and while the card is “Out of Stock” already in most places or is being sold for an extra high price where there are some quantities, there is still no proper driver available for that GPU. Let me explain what I mean by that, on AMD’s website there is still only one driver available for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series of GPUs, released on 1/9/2012 with no version or information what features it supports, it is only available for Windows 7 64-bit OS, so you can pretty safely assume this is not the typical official video driver you are used in getting from AMD for their products.

The problem with this driver release is that there is no information about what features it supports, not only regarding the stereo 3D, but in general what from the all new things that were announced with the release of the new GPU are already supported. The latest official Catalyst Driver 11.12 is from 12/13/2011, or over a month ago and it does not have support for the new GPUs. So AMD may need some time for releasing a proper driver and for making available all the features initially introduced in the Catalyst Preview driver 12.1 as well as all the new things announced as supported for the new GPU. And especially if you are interested in using the HD 7970 for stereoscopic 3D gaming you might have trouble not only in getting the new software related features, but also in getting the 3D-capable hardware that is going to be compatible with them. Not to mention the fact that you may have trouble finding more than one of these cards or that you will have to pay extra for them and then find out that stereo 3D mode is not yet supported in CrossfireX in the driver. Better play it safe now, instead of being sorry later on, because of being too eager to get your hands on the new hardware. I do plan to do some testing of the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 in stereo 3D mode when a proper driver for it is released…

The game Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an exclusive AMD HD3D technology title, meaning that the developers from Eidos-Montreal have partnered with AMD in order to make native stereoscopic 3D output mode compatible with the HD3D technology along with some other extra features. The game also supports AMD’s Eyefinity multi-monitor technology and is also a DirectX 11 title, although DX11 support is not exclusive for AMD-based hardware, but also works with Nvidia-based video cards. Now, what native stereoscopic 3D support means is that the game engine itself renders the slightly different left and right views that are used to create the illusion of depth in the virtual game world. Or with other words in order to have stereo 3D support in Deus Ex: Human Revolution on compatible AMD hardware you don’t need to use middle-ware such as the iZ3D Driver or the TriDef 3D software as you’d normally do in order to get a game work in stereo 3D mode with an ATI/AMD-based video card. The native stereoscopic 3D support sends the two views directly to the video driver using the quad-buffer support offered by the AMD HD3D technology, an example of what you can do by using the recently released AMD Quad-Buffer SDK.

So far, so good, however what about everyone that is using the more popular and more available alternative called 3D Vision by Nvidia? Well, they are pretty much screwed since there is no official support for stereoscopic 3D output for 3D Vision and the game does not render that well if you manage to make it work using the 3D Vision software to “convert” it in stereo 3D mode. But since the 3D Vision driver can also work in a similar way like the AMD’s HD3D quad-buffer works, it would’ve been very hard to also implement official stereo 3D output for 3D Vision. After all the game engine apparently already renders everything in proper stereo 3D mode, so it only needs to send the images to the 3D Vision for displaying on the screen. And since Nvidia apparently did not partner with the developers we get no such support, so the stereo 3D support in game becomes not so appealing feature as a lot of people already having 3D Vision are not able to take advantage of it. Or even worse, they get the game expecting it to work with 3D Vision as it is being advertised and they get disappointed, of course not reading carefully enough before pre-ordering or purchasing the game is their own fault, but still. And if you take a look at the official game forum you can notice a lot of people asking about 3D Vision support… So was the move to make the game limited to supporting only AMD’s HD3D technology while at the same time developing a native stereoscopic 3D rendering game engine? Financially probably yes during the development process, however considering the fact that the game supports stereo 3D only for PC it is a strange decision, or maybe the stereoscopic 3D support was never intended to be one of the main features of the game. However the constantly increasing number of 3D-ready PC gamers have made the stereoscopic 3D support a big topic of discussion, and that goes not only for the unhappy 3D Vision users…

A lot of gamers using ATI/AMD-based video cards and relying on middle-ware solutions such as the iZ3D Driver or the TriDef 3D software also are complaining of trouble making the game work in stereo 3D mode. And a lot of people using these solutions have ATI/AMD-based hardware, but use it with different kinds of 3D display solutions that are not supported by the use of AMD HD3D technology getting the direct S3D output from the game engine. So the situation with these users is pretty much the same as with people with 3D Vision, they don’t get that great stereoscopic 3D output as instead of getting the perfect S3D output from the game engine, they need the middle-ware solution to create the stereoscopic 3D output for them. So as a result even more people with stereo 3D solutions are left out, just because they are not AMD HD3D ready, although they may have the perfectly capable ATI/AMD-based video cards. Makes you wonder if the game developer ever think about the gamers that will be using this stereo 3D features or they think they can just say they’ve made something fancy to boost their sales. Stereoscopic 3D support for gaming on the PC is still far from perfect, there are multiple solutions available and no industry wide support present, so that you can easily make a game supporting stereoscopic 3D output for all of the available 3D displays. But most developers that are making games promoted as stereo 3D capable do try to add support for at least most of the available solutions and to ensure that this stereoscopic 3D support looks good and works well with all of them, like in the game Avatar for example.

So what can you do if you are one of the gamers with a stereoscopic 3D capable computer, but are left out by the game’s native AMD HD3D only support? Well, you need to either play the game in 2D mode or do some things in order to make it somewhat playable in stereo 3D mode. You need to start by running the game in DirectX 9 and not DirectX 11 mode, so that you would be able to use your middle-ware stereo 3D solution (3D Vision, iZ3D or TriDef 3D) with better, but far from perfect results. Another thing that you should be aware of is the fact that by default the game has its convergence preset at a specific level and you are able to only adjust the depth level. This is something that a lot of the game developers making a stereoscopic 3D title tend to do in order to provide decent level of depth and minimal to no pop-out of the image. And while this has some advantages, especially for people new to stereo 3D gaming, the more advanced users and people that have already played for a while in stereoscopic 3D mode literally hate when this happens. The reason is that they want to be able to make the adjustment of the convergence as they wish as they can easily handle more pop-out and usually want to be able to make the game pop-out, so completely locking out convergence adjustment is indeed another not recommended thing. You can warn the users not to play with it if they don’t know what they are doing and provide an easy option to reset it to the default value for example, but not completely lock it out to a preset value that you may think is the best. Now, there may be some good news for owners of 3D Vision systems as Andrew Fear has reported in the Nvidia forums earlier this month that Nvidia is cooperating with Eidos to bring proper 3D Vision support, would’ve been nice to have that right from the start however. It won’t however hurt if you mention in the official Deus Ex: Human Revolution forums that you’d like to have proper stereoscopic 3D support added to the game, not only for 3D Vision, but also for iZ3D or TriDef 3D if you are using these. But remember, in order for your post to have effect you should not use rude tone or demanding something, just say you’d like to see that support in a future update, so that the game developer can see there is actually a big demand in proper stereo 3D support from the gaming community that plays in stereo 3D mode.

- To visit the official Deus Ex: Human Revolution game forums…

AMD has updated its lower power consumption Fusion C-Series and E-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), or with other words chips that have both the CPU and GPU on the same silicon. The new chips should be offering enhanced HD graphics capabilities and performance boost with enhanced memory thanks to the support of DDR3 1333MHz memory according to AMD. They should also bring DisplayPort support as well as improved battery life when used in mobile devices, providing up to 12 hours of usage on a single battery charge for the C-Series APU and up to 10.5 hours for the E-Series.

But the most interesting new features in the updated AMD Fusion C-Series and E-Series APUs is the addition of HDMI 1.4a interface that also means these will be able to also support stereoscopic 3D output to compatible display devices. Of course considering that these chips do not have that much graphical performance you can forget about being able to play games in stereo 3D mode, however watching 3D videos and 3D movies as well as going over 3D photos should not be a problem for them. And thanks to their low power consumption they can turn out to be a great choice for a small and silent, but powerful enough stereo 3D-capable multimedia system, no matter if it is in the form of a netbook, notebook or a small form factor PC.

You can say that AMD is quickly catching up to Intel with their Fusion platform, by offering better graphical features and performance as compared to what the latest generation of Intel integrated GPUs can offer. And although Intel’s mobile platforms may still be ahead in terms of CPU performance and features, AMD is getting ahead with a better GPU support, so this way they are compensating the difference and nowadays the GPU becomes more and more important. Just as a reminder, the latest generation of Intel integrated graphics in the Sandy Bridge platform also does have support for HDMI 1.4 output, but also offering performance capable for only 3D photo and 3D video. But even the least powerful Sandy Bridge-based mobile processors are not as power efficient as what some of AMD’s Fusion APUs can offer you and that is very important thing when you are in a need of not so powerful, but more energy efficient solution.

And all this talk about AMD’s APUs reminds me to ask if any one of you is actually using a Fusion-based device of any kind at the moment or at least has considered in getting such for whatever purpose?