3D Vision Blog

Some good news for the owner of 3D Vision stereoscopic setups that just came form NVIDIA. It seem that NVIDIA has been working closely with the leading movie playback software developers, including Arcsoft (TotalMedia Theatre), Corel (WinDVD), Cyberlink (PowerDVD Ultra) and Sonic (Roxio CinePlayer BD), to ensure seamless support for 3D Blu-ray titles when they are ready to ship in 2010. These software players for PC should be compatible with 3D Vision for watching 3D Blu-ray movies when they become available – first half of 2010 positively thinking or the second half negatively thinking. There should also be a GPU-acceleration in the decoding of the AVC-MVC compression that is going to be used by the 3D Blu-ray discs by compatible GeForce-based video cards. And this is to be expected as in order to achieve stereoscopic 3D at Full HD resolution you’ll have to increase the video data up to doubling the information, which in turn will be making it harder to decompress in real time without additional acceleration. The good thing is that the 3D Blu-ray specifications should be able to take advantage of different 3D display technologies, such as frame-sequential with active shutter glasses like 3D Vision and line-sequential or side-by-side with passive polarized glasses. We are all expecting for the 3D Blu-ray specifications to be finalized by the end of December, but there is still a possibility for delays…

Over the last few weeks, NVIDIA has successfully demonstrated playback of 3D content encoded with the AVC Multi-View Codec (or AVC-MVC), the codec that is expected to become the foundation for how 3D content is encoded onto Blu-ray discs. 3D Blu-ray content encoded in AVC–MVC can be decoded in real time on select NVIDIA GPUs — resulting in a home 3D experience that is equal to or better to what is offered in movie theaters today. NVIDIA GPUs that can decode 3D Blu-ray content include the GeForce GT 240 ($99 U.S. MSRP), as well as upcoming next-generation GF100 GPUs based on the NVIDIA “Fermi” architecture. This will allow consumers to build desktop PCs powered by GeForce GPUs and NVIDIA 3D Vision active shutter glasses for under $1000 in total, making them the ideal platform for watching 3D Blu-ray movies, viewing 3D photographs, browsing 3D Web sites, or playing more than 400 PC game titles in 3D.

NVIDIA will be demonstrating 3D Blu-ray playback running on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA 3D Vision technology at the CES trade show in Las Vegas from January 7 to 11, 2010. If you are visiting CES, you shoudl be able to see 3D blu-ray demo on Nvidia’s booth #35912 in the South Hall 4.

Few days ago AMD also announced that it plans to demonstrate the new Blu-ray 3D standard that is “due to arrive on commercial discs in the second half of 2010″. It seems that AMD has partnered with CyberLink to do a preview of the Blu-ray stereoscopic 3D technology during the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. But unlike NVIDIA’s 3D Vision, AMD hasn’t got its own stereoscopic 3D hardware to present with and there is no information regarding the availability of GPU-acceleration of the AVC-MVC decoding process on ATI GPUs. AMD will be located in the Grand Lobby (GL-8 and GL-10) of the Las Vegas Convention Center, so you better go and take a look if you are visiting CES for more information.

Do you remember my post regarding the supposedly “new” feature in the ATI’s Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs actually offering Stereoscopic 3D support of some kind about two weeks ago (Is ATI preparing an alternative to Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision?)? Back then I suggested that ATI is trying to push a third party feature, claiming it is something new in their new GPUs, like IZ3D’s driver support for instance and it turns out I was right on the spot. Today I’ve just got a confirmation from the local ATI PR guy that they indeed meant that and that there is actually nothing coming directly from ATI:

Our graphics cards can drive various 3D display devices as long as the user has the correct middleware. Two middleware companies we are working with are Dynamic Digital Depth, and iZ3D.

So DDD’s TriDef software and IZ3D’s drivers do support ATI, but they do not specifically require you to have ATI Radeon HD 5000 series GPU as they will also work on older cards based on ATI graphic processors and the thing is that these two companies actually produce GPU manufacturer independent stereoscopic 3D solutions. In plain words this means that both TriDef and Iz3D will work regarding the type of your GPU, so not only on ATI, but also on Nvidia hardware… so can this be considered as a new feature only on Radeon HD 5000 series? If you ask me it cannot as there is actually nothing new that requires you to have the latest ATI GPUs to use both of these solutions, not to mention that you don’t need to have an ATI graphic processor at all. The only thing that is good to have is at least a middle-end video card, preferably a high-end one, because when playing in S3D your GPU performance is a key factor, so getting the new ATI-based video cards are only good because of having a lot of raw power for processing. Still I might prefer getting Nvidia VGA and use it with 3D Vision as it has better game support (not only), more user friendly (although not completely problem free), oh wait… I do have a 3D Vision setup (among a few others) and an Nvidia GPU already … ;)

By now you should already know that Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) is the new “3D” in gaming and not only in gaming, but in movies to, so it is not hard to guess that everyone is willing to jump on the plane as early as possible to take advantage of the built momentum later on. Nvidia already did that with GeForce 3D Vision and the product has become quite popular and is gaining quite a lot of attention although its development could be improved a bit in terms of quicker reaction to new games coming out, but is ATI (the biggest competitor of Nvidia) preparing an alternative stereoscopic 3D solution of their own?

Today, browsing through the specifications of the recently announced Radeon HD 5870 GPU, I’ve noticed something interesting and of course I started to look for more information about it, but to my surprise there was none at all. I’m referring to the sentence “3D stereoscopic display/glasses support” that you can find almost at the bottom of the page wit specifications of the new GPU under the category ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology. Looking at the bottom of the page with notes there is this explanation available “Requires 3D stereo drivers, glasses, and display“, which does not clarify things in any way, but actually does the opposite. So is ATI preparing 3D stereo drivers that will be compatible with their latest Radeon HD 5000 range of GPUs along with development of shutter glasses much like 3D Vision, that will be compatible for instance with 120Hz monitors from ViewSonic and Samsung already available? Or maybe the guys from ATI are just stating the obvious, that their new GPUs are capable of Stereoscopic 3D playback of videos and games, if you are using a third party software and hardware solution, for instance like IZ3D’s monitors and drivers. But if they are saying that for just their new GPUs it would be weird, because the older Radeon HD 4000 series also were supported in other third party S3D solutions, so it is nothing new, right?

Anyway if you have some information regarding this you are more than welcome to share it with us… ;)