3D Vision Blog

With the E3 Expo right around the corner there are rumors starting to appear that Microsoft is going to introduce native stereoscopic 3D support for their Xbox 360 game console. According to the unofficial information Xbox 360 may get a firmware update that will introduce HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D support for native 720p gaming. But unlike all owners of PlayStation 3 consoles, a firmware update for the Xbox 360 will not introduce S3D support for all consoles, due to the fact that the first Xbox 360 consoles did not feature HDMI video output. This may open up the doors to much wider stereoscopic 3D adoption for the Xbox 360 console as currently there are just a few titles that support stereo 3D output and all these achieve it through a native engine supporting different output modes. Getting S3D support on a console level will make it easier for game developers to add that feature, but don’t forget that it is only a rumor for for now…

There are a lot of people that expect this year to finally see 1080p 3D-capable projectors on the market with more affordable prices, thinking about upgrading their current 720p 3D projectors or directly going for such a solution with gaming in stereo 3D mode as one of the main things to do on a big screen. Currently one of the most affordable 1080p 3D projector is Sharp XV-Z17000 available for about 3-4K USD, but even this is considered high for more mainstream users not looking to build a home movie theater, but instead planning to use the projector for gaming. Especially considering that there are some mainstream 3D-capable 720p projectors such as the Acer H5360 available for just about $600 USD, so paying 2-3 times that price for a projector supporting 3D and 1080p resolutions sounds reasonable, but more not so much.

Leaving the still higher price for 3D support and 1080p resolution as features available together in a projector, there are some other important things that you should consider if you are looking to buy an 3D Full HD projector for gaming. Having an industry standard such as HDMI 1.4 is good for a lot of things, but can also bring some issues because of some limitations it implies on hardware that is using it. And you can expect pretty much any 3D-capable 1080p projector for consumers that is expected this year to be based on that particular standard. For movie lovers that should not be a problem as the HDMi 1.4 standard supports high enough bandwidth to push 1080p at 24Hz in 3D mode, but for gaming in stereo 3D mode this is simply not enough and you should go back to 720p resolution where you can get 50 or 60Hz per eye in 3D mode. So what is the point in going for a 1080p 3D projector using HDMI 1.4 if you plan to use it for gaming – absolutely no point in doing that. You better stay with a much more affordable 720p model if you have one or go for such 3D projector for playing games in stereo 3D mode, and you can of course play 3D movies in 1080p resolution on it without very significant visual quality “loss”.

In 720p resolution you would have to use some Anti-Aliasing to smooth the jagged edges in games, something like 4xAA should be quite close to what you get at 1080p resolution without AA in terms of edge smoothness, although there would be still some difference in the level of details you get. But in general playing at lower resolution may also help you get by in stereo 3D mode even with not a top-end video card with a decent framerate as compared to playing with the same hardware on 1080p display for example. And having a bigger projected screen helps a lot for the immersion as compared to a much smaller 3D monitor for example that may have higher resolution, not to mention the fact that 3D DLP technology is practically crosstalk/ghosting free in 3D mode.

Having a 3D-capable projector using HDMI 1.4 has the advantage that it should be compatible with much wider range of hardware, not only PC (Nvidia’s 3D Vision and AMD’ HD3D technology), but also standalone consumer electronic devices with support for 3D such as the PlayStation 3 console, or a Blu-ray 3D player. The disadvantage when using HDMI 1.4 is that it only supports 720p 50/60Hz 3D mode and 1080p 24Hz 3D mode, the rest is only in 2D mode and you cannot use the projector at 120Hz in 2D mode like you can do with projectors using HDMI 1.3 or VGA interface for example (this can vary greatly on the specific projector).

So if you are waiting for an affordable 1080p 3D-capable projector to become available in order for you to use it for gaming in stereo 3D mode and not for 3D movies, then you should probably reconsider your decision…

A few days ago I’ve written that my second GeForce GTX 580 video card has died, but now thanks to support from Nvidia I got the issue resolved and a replacement card, so I’m back with a working SLI setup and thus I was able to finish testing with the new Sandy Bridge platform. In the previous article Intel Sandy Bridge Plus SLI for Stereo 3D Gaming with 3D Vision I’ve compared the older Asus Sabertooth P55 motherboard with an Intel Core i5 750 processor overclocked at 4GHz along with the two GTX 580s in SLI to the newer Asus Sabertooth P67 (Sandy Bridge) motherboard with Intel Core i5 2500K running at 5 GHz. In the previous tests however the focus was the CPU and motherboard and what benefits are there in terms of performance increase for gaming in 2D (plain 3D) as well as in stereo 3D mode. But I’ve went further by overclocking the two GTX 580 video cards and repeated the tests to measure the additional performance increase you can get besides just overclocking the processor and changing the platform…

The two GeForce GTX 580 video cards in SLI were with GPUs overclocked from 772 MHz to 950 MHz or that is 170 MHz increase of the default frequencies for both. And the working frequency of the memory was overclocked from the default 4008 MHz to 4850 MHz which is a bit pushing it, but is easily achievable when using water cooling, because operating temperatures remain quite low even under high load for long time. Of course the system is already with an overclocked Intel Core i5 2500K processor running at 5GHz and in the tables below you can see a comparison between the results achieved with the processor at default and at 5 GHz with the video cards not overclocked and with 5GHz with the VGAs also overclocked.

Starting with popular synthetic benchmark 3DMark 2006, the performance increase here is quite small after overclocking the GPUs, but that is to be expected as this test is more CPU dependent than GPU limited. The newer 3DMark 11 that is heavily relying on the video card is showing much better performance increase as expected…

After overclocking the video cards in the game tests in 2D mode (plain 3D) the increase is not that significant, but here we already have high enough average framerate with about 100 fps for the more demanding games and even more with not so heavy titles.

Moving to the game benchmark in stereo 3D mode, after overclocking the two video cards and with the processor at 5GHz almost all games are hitting average framerate of 60 fps per eye, except for Just Cause 2 and Metro 2033. These two titles that are a bit more demanding when played with high detail settings do show much higher performance increase after overclocking the GPUs as compared to overclocking the CPU only. But still with them you may need to sacrifice a bit of extra details or effects to get an average fps of about 60 frames per eye in stereo 3D mode, not that with an average of 40 fps per eye these games are unplayable, on the contrary, but yo would expect a bit more with such a high-end system that is also decently overclocked to get the maximum performance out of it for stereoscopic 3D gaming in Full HD resolution with maxed out detail levels and even some AA enabled in games to smooth out the edges…

Still I can say that I’m pretty happy form the additional performance increase after the upgrade to the new Sandy Bridge platform, and now the new B3 revision of the Sandy Bridge chipsets are becoming available, so you can safely do the upgrade as well. The new K-series i5 and i7 processors offer better overclockability than the previous generation, but still when talking about gaming, you may be able to get better performance increase with a higher-end video card, or by adding a second video card in SLI, than by just pushing the CPU frequency or increasing the number of cores. Because the truth is that still most of the latest games still cannot yet take advantage of more than one CPU core, but they can fully utilize the additional video performance that a more powerful video card can offer. So if you are just gaming in stereo 3D mode, then it may be more worth to upgrade your GPU than to go for a Sandy Bridge upgrade, but if you already have a high-end GPU or even more than one, then upgrading the processor and the motherboard can still be a good choice. And although most games can’t fully utilize the total performance that a new multi-core processor can offer, there are a lot of applications that can do that and you are probably using quite a few of these as well, for example software for video editing and conversion.