Singularity is a first-person shooter developed by Raven Software and utilizing the power and flexibility of the Unreal 3 game engine, but also bringing its issues when played in stereo 3D mode. Set in an alternate present of 2010 (and back in time), where you take on the role of an US Air Force pilot who while investigating an extreme radiation signature, stumbles upon a top secret Cold War era Soviet program, run amok which not only causes monstrous mutations, but also threatens to alter nature of time itself. And being a relatively good person you make a mistake that changes both the past and the present and thus you also get the responsibility to correct your mistake and patch things up as much as possible, or the whole world is really doomed.
So, I’ll start by saying that personally liked the game (played it until the end) and most of the time I’ve played it in stereo 3D mode, partly in order to find the best custom convergence settings as there is no profile for the game already available even in the latest 3D Vision drivers. By using the Unreal 3 engine means that the game will have some issues in stereo 3D mode as most other games using the engine do, and although the Unreal engine got official stereo 3D support it will take some time for the games to start using the latest version of the engine. The typical problems with shadows and lights are here, so you may get some halos around objects with fog or fire or other effects around them to see shadows both in the left and right of an object, so it will look tripled. The HUD is 2D, so you get onscreen messages in 2D as well as the normal crosshair which is also in 2D, but when you zoom in for a closer shot trough a gun, then you get a 3D crosshair. So below you may find my custom convergence settings that try to find the right balance to minimize the negative effects that you cannot overcome otherwise as by default the game looks quite flat. Still you should stay on the lowest depth level up to just a few percents above the lowest setting with the custom convergence settings for best results. If you try my settings you are more than welcome to share your comments about them below, just have in mind that they do not fix everything like a miracle and there are still some issues.
If you were waiting for a more affordable, but still high-performing video card based on the new Nvidia Fermi architecture today that wait seems to be over with the official announcement of the new GeForce GTX 460 GPUs. These come cheaper than the not so long ago GTX 465 ones, but are faster than them, not to mention that the cards based on the new GPUs seem to be cooler and quieter too and offering a good potential for overclocking or at least that is what I’ve been seeing in some of the first reviews already available online…
A bit on the technical side, The GeForce GTX 460 GPU has 336 CUDA cores and 56 texture units and will be available in 2 different versions – with 1GB video memory and 256-bit memory bus and with 768MB video memory and 192-bit memory bus. The GPU’s frequency is 675 MHz by default and the shaders are running at 1350 MHz, but you should be able to easily go even up to 800MHz and maybe even more by overclocking it. The memory is GDDR5 and is running at 1800MHz (3600 effectively) on both models with 768MB and 1GB, and what makes the difference in performance between them is actually the memory bus that limits the maximum bandwidth on the 768MB model. The two models’ recommended end user prices are $199 and $229 USD respectively and they are already starting to appear on stock and for pre-orders at popular online e-tailers like Amazon.com and Newegg.com…
The new GeForce GTX 460 GPUs should be more than capable of handling good enough stereo 3D gaming and Blu-ray 3D playback with GPU acceleration and because of their more affordable price they are also going to be much more attractive for SLI setups. Although if we are going to talk about SLI for 3D Vision Surround, then it is best to go for two GTX 480-based video cards to have the top possible performance, so that you will be able to fully enjoy playing on three monitors in stereo 3D mode… ;)
Somewhere along the idea to upgrade the old 3D Test PC with water cooling (details for that project are available here) I got the idea to leave the other computer as a dedicated AMD/ATI test system and build a completely new 3D test PC for 3D Vision, again with water cooling of course. So practically you can say I’ve started working on the two projects at the same time, but the system that just needed the upgrade was finished much faster than the completely new system. The reason for that being that I wanted to make everything the right way, choose the components carefully and apply a matching custom water cooling and the end product to be really good looking and performing as fast as possible in order to have the ultimate 3D Test PC for testing stereo 3D content and of course to be able to game comfortably enough in stereo 3D with the 3D Vision. Now that there are just some minor unexpected details left to work out…
The photos above are from the almost finished Green Reactor PC with a lot of small finishing details only left to be done, so it is pretty much ready and working at this point of time. I’ll just update with some more pictures when all the finishing touches are ready… So stay tuned for more information and photos.
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