3D Vision Blog

MTBS3D is reporting a very interesting news regarding the iZ3D driver, it seems that the company developing it has decided to release the source code of the project to the stereo 3D community, making the iZ3D driver open source. There is no official announcement about that available yet on iZ3D’s website, but it is supposed to follow very soon, so stay tuned for more information. This is definitely good news as it should allow the stereoscopic 3D community to continue the further development and improvement of the code of the software…

According to Vadim Asadov, iZ3D’s VP of Business Development, their stereoscopic 3D drivers will be made available as open source for gamers looking to adjust and optimize for new games and future technologies. The resulting software will be free to use by everyone, and should be available in about eight weeks.

iZ3D has been silent for quite a while with new releases of their driver, the last official version 1.12 of the driver was made available on October 23rd, 2010 and the last beta 1.13 RC was released on June 15th, 2011. Back in august last year, on iZ3D’s blog there was a publication hinting that there are going to be some changes in the company, but we did not expect that they plan to make their stereoscopic 3D software an open source product. Let us see how this goes in a few weeks when the source code is made available, hopefully this will help the constantly growing stereoscopic 3D gaming community as the iZ3D driver is quite powerful and offers a lot of advanced features already. And hopefully it will put some more pressure to the other companies developing such solutions in order to bring more features faster and to allow more control to the users, so that the stereo 3D community can also contribute better in the future development of those as well.

Update: The official announcement is here with a little extra requirements, it seems that iZ3D is going to try and raise funding from gamers for the release of the driver as an open source product. And while this isn’t such a bad idea, going for a minimum of $150 from user is very limiting and the goal of $800K is also quite high, so at this point the success of this initiative seems a little vague.

iZ3D OSC Program
Starting on April 9, 2012, iZ3D will accept payments of $150.00 US dollars to convert the iZ3D driver code into an Open Source Project. Multiple payments are accepted. Your $150 payment contributes to providing the user community with access to iZ3D Universal Driver under GPL at the time the iZ3D Driver Software is converted to Open Source status. As soon as the total amount of payments will reach US $800,000, the entire iZ3D driver code will be opened and placed on www.iZ3d.com under GPL license.

However, in case iZ3D will not reach the above targeted amount, prior to June 30, 2012, the company will decide one of two options:
1. Open the code even though $800,000 are not reached
2. Cancel Open Source Project and refund all received payments

They should probably have used Kickstarter for that, but anyway, if you want to support the release of the iZ3D driver’s source code under GPL license you are welcome to do so and make your contribution here.

While iZ3D still hasn’t released the new beta driver version 1.13 that we are waiting for, they have made available a 1.13 beta baseprofile for downloading that you can use with your 1.12 driver installation. This means that you should be able to replace your current baseprofile with no problems with this new one and get access to the new stereo presets for over 300 supported games according to iZ3D.

The new baseprofile has fixes for:

- Battlefield Bad Company 2 Interface in DX 11
- Civilization V Interface
- Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 Interface in DX9
- Crysis 2 Intefrace
- Monday Night Combat Interface
- King Arthur Interface
- Darkspore Beta Interface
- LEGO Star Wars 3: Clone Wars Interface
- Back to the Future Ep1 & Ep2 Interface
- Need for Speed Shift 2 Interface

In the new baseprofile there are also some minor changes, like the significantly improved exceptions system and the fact that user profile presets will now always have a higher priority.

To replace your current Baseprofile with this new one one, go to “C:\ProgramData\iZ3D Driver\” (On Vista or Windows 7) or to “C:\Users\All Users\Aplication Data\Roaming\iZ3D Driver” (on XP) and replace Baseprofile.xml with one that you can download from the link below. It is still not a new driver, but at least it is something before we can actually see the new 1.13 beta release, hopefully soon…

- To download the new 1.13 beta baseprofile for the iZ3D driver…

When talking about gaming in stereo 3D mode there are pretty much three driver solutions that are available at the moment, allowing the conversion of 3D games into stereoscopic 3D ones and these are Nvidia’s 3D Vision, DDD’s TriDef 3D and the iZ3D Driver. All of these solutions rely on predefined profiles on per application basis in order to provide good default settings, so that when the user runs a game he can start enjoying it immediately in stereo 3D mode, without having to do some tweaking and adjustment. Making it user friendly is required in order to have normal gamers playing in stereo 3D mode and not just enthusiasts, and the solution with the profiles seems as a great idea to ensure that. There is however a drawback to this approach that is common to all three solutions, you actually need the developer to release frequent updates with new profiles for game titles before or at the exact time new games are released. And we well know that this is not an easy task, because you have to have professionals playing games and creating these profiles, but how is each of these companies doing with that task? One approach to kind of ease the task is to also allow the users to create their own profiles for games, but that is not working that well and is not always possible or easy, especially for novice users… sharing these user-generated profiles among users can also be problem.

Nvidia is the most frequent with updates for their stereoscopic 3D drivers, but then again it is the biggest company among the three and has a lot of resources devoted to improving their 3D Vision technology. Although being limited only to Nvidia GPUs this technology works very well, because the company also develops their own video cards and drivers that are optimized to all work together. But even Nvidia is late at times with the release of profiles for new games and this is something that gamers playing in stereo 3D mode are not happy about. The latest WHQL driver Nvidia has released was from January 18th, but the latest beta driver is from March 2nd and usually there are more releases in between. The user options for generating profiles are very limited at the moment and even the sharing between users is harder as the settings are saved in the registry, and in different places for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, so Nvidia needs to improve things here a bit as well to engage the big 3D Vision user community to actually help. Still Nvidia’s solution is probably the most user friendly and easy to use by people totally new to stereo 3D gaming or stereoscopic 3D multimedia on a PC, unless of course you try to do something that is not officially supported.

DDD is on the second place in terms of frequent updates, although their latest TriDef 3D release is from last year and more specifically December 23rd which is already about two months and a half ago. The TriDef 3D software currently has less game profiles available and there are even some user generated game profiles included in the official release. The profiles here are a bit more advanced with more user controllable options, so a good profile created by the users and shared in a dedicated official forum can be included in the next release. The TriDef 3D also has some extra features such as auto focus support, the virtual 3D mode etc. The problem here however is that the driver does not support that many 3D output options, although it is a universal driver, meaning that it is not tied to a specific brand of GPUs, like in the case with 3D Vision for example, but instead works on all graphic processors… with higher performance hit at times. So the thing that is probably holding back DDD from getting more popular is their smaller community and the fact that being more advanced and with more options it is more confusing for the novice users.

iZ3D is the least active in terms of driver updates and that is starting to be a problem, especially after the company stopped producing their own 3D monitor hardware with the idea of focusing more on the software, but that apparently is not yet happening, or we are not seeing it materialized at least. The latest driver released by iZ3D was made available on October 23rd and that is four and a half months ago with not even a newer beta version getting released. Before releasing their last driver, the time between the previous official releases was also quite long, but at least there were a few beta releases meanwhile. At the same time the also universal in terms of GPU support driver from iZ3D is also quite advanced with more control for user generated profiles and probably a bigger and more enthusiastic community of users, although not as big as with 3D Vision. The iZ3D driver is also the most flexible one in terms of supported different stereoscopic 3D output methods of all three, so it is the preferred solution for enthusiasts going the 3D DIY way and these are usually the most advanced users. However they probably support the least number of games with available profiles and the lack of more frequent updates does not help at all to keep users happy, but this is also probably why the community is more active around this solution.

Up until now the focus above with the updates was set on game profiles, however more frequent updates also mean new features, fixed bugs, added support for new compatible 3D products and so on. For example when talking about DirectX 9 games all three solutions are pretty much on the same good level, but if we move to games using the more recent DirectX 10 or 11, then Nvidia gets way ahead as the other two solutions still have some problems with these. Nvidia’s solution is only limited to the company’s shutter glasses and compatible 3D monitors, projectors and HDTVs, but the number of these is already quite big, so you still have a lot of options, although they all use the same technology. The two other solutions support multiple 3D display technologies, so they don’t only work with shutter glasses, but also with autostereoscopic displays, passive polarized solutions etc., their support on the most popular recently shutter-based solutions however is still lacking a bit, so they need to do some catching up. What is common to all three solutions is that they are not too user friendly for novice users, neither they give too much options for the more advanced users to be able to take full control. Nvidia’s 3D Vision solution is probably the easiest for use by novice users, but it is also the most constrained for more advanced users, that want to get out of the boundaries set by Nvidia… and the thing here is that in order to make it more user friendly the company had to be more restrictive. The most advanced in terms of user controllable features and options and profile creation is probably DDD’s TriDef, although the iZ3D is very close as well, but they both seem too hard and confusing when a total novice to stereo 3D gaming tries to use them at first. There are a lot of things that still need to be done and all three companies should still further develop their products a lot, taking into account what users want and need, but also actively using the feedback from their user communities and actually helping them help further develop the specific stereo 3D solution… something that is not happening that much at the moment. And more frequent driver updates including even just new profiles for games won’t hurt anyway, would they, they will just make more gamers happy being able to play in stereo 3D mode without having to become S3D gurus themselves… ;)