3D Vision Blog

Today THQ and NVIDIA officially confirmed with a press release that the upcoming first person shooter from 4A Games called Metro 2033 will support a number of advanced DirectX 11 features with the latest generation of DX11 graphics cards, as well as 3D Vision support. Metro 2033 will also feature advanced, hardware accelerated physical effects using Nvidia PhysX. Now this combination is very interesting considering the fact that Nvidia has yet to officially announce their first DirectX 11-capable GPUs (Fermi/GF100) and the game will be available in a month from now. Not to mention that the 3D Vision drivers also are still not able to support DirectX 11, meaning that it will be either DX11 or 3D Vision at first. Still the gamers with DX11 cards (ATI owners only and in 2D so far) should be able to experience advanced Depth of Field effects as well as Full Tessellation on character models.

“Our engineers have been working closely with 4A Games to ensure that Metro 2033 takes full advantage of some of the spectacular effects made possible with the next generation of DX11 hardware,” said Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content and Technology at NVIDIA. “The 4A Engine is one of the most advanced game engines we’ve ever worked with, and with DX11 enabled, Metro 2033 is undoubtedly one of the best looking PC games of 2010. Combine this with NVIDIA 3D Vision and PhysX and you will experience mind-blowing visuals.”

Metro 2033 is scheduled for release in North America and Germany on the 16th March, Australia on the 18th March, and in the UK and the rest of Europe on the 19th March with pre-orders for it already being taken.

- Gallery of DirectX 11 rendered game characters from Metro 2033
- To pre-order the game Metro 2033 from Amazon for $49.99 USD…

You should be aware of the program FRAPS if you ever benchmarked a game, needed an FPS counter in real time regardless of the 3D application, wanted to record an in-game video footage of you playing or just taking some screenshots. Just have in mind that FRAPS is a commercial application that will cost you $37, but there is a free trial version that you can try for free first to see if it will do what you need.
Nevertheless FRAPS is a very useful application and it just got an update to version 3.0.0 getting some new and very nice features, even for the Stereoscopic 3D community, so we should thank its author for that. I’m talking about the new ability to record stereoscopic 3D content right while you are playing your game with Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision (officially) and it seems that it also works with iZ3D’s drivers. It seems that so far you can only record games using DirectX9 (D3D9), but you’ll be getting a video recording with side by side frames for the left and right eye that can be later on played with a stereoscopic 3D player. But besides the new and interesting ability to record S3D videos, FRAPS 3.0.0 also comes with some nice new features, so here is what is new…

3.0.0 – 5th Nov 2009
- DirectX 11 support
- Compatible with Windows 7 final (RTM) and RC1 versions
- Stereoscopic 3D Vision video capture up to 1920×1200 for D3D9 games
- Force lossless RGB option to always capture video in pure form
- Ability to mix both game sound and external input such as microphone (Vista/Win7 only)

P.S. The only drawback, especially if you want to record S3D video in full resolution is the additional drop in framerate you’ll get, so be prepared to push your PC to its limits (and probably do an upgrade) in order to produce HD videos in stereoscopic 3D side by side format. ;)

- To download and try the new FRAPS version 3.0.0…