Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a first-person shooter set to be released on March 2nd, as a sequel to released in 2008 game Battlefield: Bad Company. The new game is still following the continuing combat adventures of misfits of the US Army’s Company “B,” and Bad Company 2 features the characteristic humor and grit of the Bad Company series, as well as a variety of gameplay improvements and additions, including 2-24 player online support; all-new four man squad gameplay; and more. Couple this with the variety of vehicle related items and classic Battlefield weapons included with the Limited Edition, and you should have the Ultimate Battlefield Bad Company experience to date. That is of course if you intend to play the game normally and not in stereoscopic 3D mode as there are some issues that you should be aware of if you are going to play it in S3D, thankfully there is a workaround for most of them so that you can enjoy the game with the added perception of depth. Oh, and I almost forgot that Bad Company 2 is actually one of the still few games that supports some features of DirectX 11 if you have the compatible hardware, but for Stereo 3D that does not concern us at all yet.
I had a chance to try the game a bit early in stereo 3D mode and play a bit with the settings to find what can be done to improve the experience for S3D players using Nvidia’s 3D Vision. The bad news is that there is still no profile in 3D Vision available and the good news is that I have prepared a custom convergence file to be used for better results. When running the game for the first time you should set the resolution and detail level accordingly to reflect your available hardware, but be aware of the fact that the game is quite heavy and requires a powerful video card to be played in high detail in stereo 3D mode. You must disable HBAO (Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion) to get better results in stereo 3D mode and the other thing is to set the AA option to 1x (disable), otherwise you might not see depth in the game! You have to also disable bloom (set bloom=false), but that is done in the settings.ini file, DirectX version in use is also being controlled from the ini file with auto set by default to choose the highest supported (DX10 for 3D Vision). The settings.ini file can be found in the documents folder in a subfolder named BFBC2 and you can edit it with a plain text editor such as Notepad.
While playing the game you can notice some problems with shadows and lights rendering – weird shadows around characters or glowing halos, lowering the depth level can help get rid of these. Generally you can play with a higher depth level without very serious issues, but for most problem free experience with the custom convergence settings you need to get the depth level to a lower setting (5%-15% should be generally Ok). The crosshair and objective indicators on the screen are rendered in 3D which is good, but the HUD is in 2D, although with custom convergence settings this is not an issue. The good news is that we are expecting an official patch to improve stereo 3D support soon after the release of the game and an official 3D Vision profile. Meanwhile if you try these recommendations and my custom convergence settings please leave your comments below on how they worked for you.
You have probably already seen the Unigine Heaven benchmark that is one of the first demos of actual game engines supporting DX11 and Tesselation (the Unigine game engine is also Stereo 3D ready), and if you haven’t you should take a look at the video above. Have in mind that the scene in the video looks like that only when running on DX11-capable hardware and with active Tessellation (only on Radeon HD 5xxx series video cards at the moment and will be supported on the upcoming GF100 “Fermi”). What you should take a not at is the level of detail that the Tessellation can add to objects in the virtual world you are playing in, for example: the rocks on the road, the walls of the buildings, the rooftops even the dragon statue looks much better and with a lot of additional detail. And when talking about stereoscopic 3D having also support for tessellation and actually using it in a game will add a lot more detail to objects making them even more realistic… by changing for example the flat rocky road to a one with uneven and bumpy rocks that actually have different depth are are much more like the real thing. You should consider the fact that with tessellation used right the 3D objects using it will not only look better on a 2D screen, but they will actually feel more real when you are viewing them with a 3D screen. This all means that tessellation is something that you should look for in upcoming games especially if you plan to play them with some sort of a stereoscopic 3D setup, but don’t be too glad and in a hurry about that…
I’ve already mentioned that at the moment only the latest ATI GPUs do have hardware support for DirectX 11 and Tessellation, but then again ATI still does not have official stereoscopic 3D support on their own. This does not mean you cannot use some sort of a stereoscopic 3D setup with an ATI hardware, but you need to also rely on additional software to support the respective technology. At the moment such software (universal by the way, working on both ATI and Nvidia hardware) is the iZ3D Driver and DDD TriDef, but there is another catch with these two. Actually more like two catches, the first – both software solutions still do not have good support or such support at all for active shutter glasses, and the second – they still do not even support DirectX 10, let alone DX 11. There is information however that both companies are working on adding DX10 support for Stereoscopic 3D and there were some promises to bring it out in January this year, but we are still waiting and the month is almost over. And then again we’ll probaly need at least a few more months until DirectX 11 support can be introduced – just enough time for more games that do actually take advantage start appearing and more mainstream and affordable hardware from both big names in the consumer VGA market.
You can say that Nvidia has a somewhat better position at this moment because their 3D Vision already does support stereoscopic 3D gaming with DirectX 10 and there is no DX11 yet, just because the company still does not have GPUs that support it on the market. A lot of people are waiting for the first such cards based on the “Fermi” architecture for quite some time already and the GF100 series are due to be out in the market most likely in the beginning of March. It would be quite interesting if Nvidia does introduce DirectX 11 support for 3D Vision too at that time as this will give them even stronger position in the S3D field, just because they don’t have to rely on external software solution they can afford to do that, but it does not mean they will. Still we’ll also need some good games that do take advantage of DX11 features and can use Tessellation to do things like the ones we see in the Unigine demo above and that could take some more time as we all played the same “game” not too long ago DX10.
But no matter how long we’ll have to wait for things to happen if you are into stereoscopic 3D gaming, then you should be looking forward to DX 11 hardware and software that does take advantage of Tessellation to make the game world much more realistic and appealing. I just hope that we are going to have games that do look like the demo in the video above and of course are normally playable even in stereoscopic 3D mode…
Unigine is an interesting cross-platform real-time 3D engine that got quite the attention lately, because of its DX11 support and impressive looking benchmarks being released, that were based on the engine. The Unigine engine contains photo-realistic 3D render, powerful physics module, object-oriented scripting system with a very rich library, full-featured GUI module, sound subsystem, and a set of flexible tools. Efficient and well-architected framework supporting multi-core CPUs and latest graphics technologies makes Unigine a highly scalable solution, on which multi-platform games of different genres can be based. But one of the most interesting features of this engine (usable not only for games) is that it offers native support of stereo 3D devices, so I had to see it in action running on a system equipped with 3D Vision…
So I’ve downloaded the latest Heaven Benchmark that is based on this engine and ran it with 3D Vision to see how well it performs in S3D mode. What I can say is that the benchmark is quite heavy, especially when you activate the stereoscopic 3D mode, but the results are very good. One thing that you’d probably want to disable from the settings are the occlusions, because they may create some weird looking effects at times, otherwise things are quite Ok. You’ll have to stick to the lowest depth level with the default convergence, which provides good enough results with barely visible ghosting on some far away objects. Increasing the depth may lead to more visible ghosting and some objects like lights being misplaced in S3D mode, but you can as well play with convergence (careful with F6, it is mapped in the benchmark). Anyway, the Unigine engine really seems to be quite well designed with stereoscopic 3D support in mind, now what we need is for game developers to start taking advantage of it…
