3D Vision Blog » stereoscopic 3d gaming

Stereo 3D Video of the HDMI Press Conference at CES 2012

Bloody — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:58:07 +0000

Neil Schneider from MTBS has managed to capture the HDMI Press Conference at CES 2012 on a 3D video, so if you’ve missed it or were unable to visit CES this year, it is something that you will probably find interesting to watch. The video is over half an hour, so make sure you have some free time when deciding to watch it. In the press conference HDMI reveals details of their new HDMI Forum and introduces its leadership, it also includes some interested details for a proposed specification upgrade as well as a discussion of stereoscopic 3D gaming on both AMD and Nvidia platforms.

- Visit MTBS3D for more interesting video coverage from 2012 CES with more yet to come…

MasterImage 3D Joins S3DGA, a New President of the Organization

Bloody — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:54:53 +0000

The S-3D Gaming Alliance (S3DGA) is considered as the official voice and standards body for stereoscopic 3D gaming and the organization just got another new member which is the company MasterImage 3D, a leading manufacturer of autostereoscopic 3D displays for mobile devices.

“We see stereo 3D gaming as one of the most vital content categories behind the explosive growth of 3D mobile devices and tablets in 2012. S3DGA has already helped us secure 3D gaming content for our display partners, and we plan to work closely on many programs to help make it easier for game developers to launch content across the latest 3D mobile devices.” – Matt Liszt, VP of Marketing for MasterImage 3D.

The S-3D Gaming Alliance also has a new president – Alan Price who up untill recently worked at Electronic Arts Canada as CTO for over four years. He is currently developing a new venture as an interactive entertainment entrepreneur. In addition to being an advocate for S-3D gaming, Alan’s experience in game development, leadership, and business sense makes him the perfect candidate for this role.

“The stereoscopic 3D gaming landscape is evolving rapidly, and there are new emerging ways we can serve our members and help build and sustain this market. I’m looking forward to the progress we can make together, and am honored to serve as S3DGA’s President.” – Alan Price, President of The S-3D Gaming Alliance.

Last but not least, the alliance is getting set for its annual meeting taking place at the end of The 3D Gaming Summit on September 22nd in Hollywood, California. Guest presentations will be made by Sony Computer Entertainment America, MasterImage 3D, Big Blue Bubble, Dynamic Digital Depth, iGO3D, S3DGA, and more.

- For more information you can visit the official website of the S-3D Gaming Alliance…

Driver Updates for Nvidia 3D Vision, DDD TriDef 3D and iZ3D Driver

Bloody — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:17:21 +0000

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… ;)

Preparing to Test the Intel Sandy Bridge Platform For S3D Gaming

Bloody — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 15:17:48 +0000

Those of you that follow the blog should remember the 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D test system with water cooling that I’ve built. In the meantime I’ve been upgrading the test PC a bit by bit, but since it is based on a bit older platform already I decided to do some testing with the recently announced Intel Sandy Bridge platform. The 3D test computer currently used an Asus P55 Sabertooth motherboard together with an Intel Core i5 750 processor overclocked to run at 4 GHz 24/7, together with dual GeForce GTX 580 video cards in SLI setup. So I’ve got two more recent high-end motherboards from Asus for testing that are based on the new platform and use the P67 chipset – Asus P67 Sabertooth and the P67 Maximus IV Extreme and an Intel Core i5 2500K processor with unlocked multiplier (for overclocking of course). The goal of this test is to reach five gigahertz by overclocking the processor and measure the performance of the new Intel Sandy Bridge platform versus the older one that I’m currently using. As you can expect the tests would be related to gaming in stereo 3D mode and comparing the framerates with both platforms and the different motherboards to see if the upgrade is worth it or not.

With all of the above said, I should also mention that currently upgrading to a Sandy Bridge platform may not be the best choice, considering that not long ago Intel has officially announced a bug in the chipset that can potentially cause SATA 2 performance degradation over time. As a result of that announcement there was a big recall of potentially affected motherboards, but that is not something that can stop an enthusiast, especially when there is still some time before the motherboards using the revised chipset can be available on the market again. So even if you get an Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard now, you can avoid using the affected SATA 2 ports and get it replaced when the revised versions become available on the market in march/april. But as an enthusiast I’m not willing to wait for a few months for the revised chipsets, so I prefer to get the platform now and test it and if needs replacing the warranty can cover that when the revised models are available later this year. So stay tuned for some results of the tests soon… ;)

User Fix For The Stereo 3D Crosshair in Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Bloody — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:14:47 +0000

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is an official 3D Vision Ready game title which in theory means that the game should play perfectly fine in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision and look great on top of that. However the road that the game needed to go through was a bit long and hard, there was a day 1 patch to address some issues in stereo 3D mode and after that a few more patches that improved the stereo 3D experience making the game better…

However for a bit over a month now there has actually been a regression in that since the latest update version 553292 that as been out for over a month already actually brought back some issues when the you play the game in stereo 3D mode. Mainly the issue of the crosshair being rendered in 2D mode again, although with earlier patches it was working perfectly fine being rendered in stereo 3D mode. And since this is a quite serious problem for a lot of users playing in stereo 3D mode (and something you will not expect from a 3D Vision Ready title), the fact that it is not being addressed with a proper patch in a timely manner is actually very strange. The good thing is that there is a working workaround that fixes the problem by replacing one of the game files with a version from a previous patch that brings back the crosshair rendering in stereo 3D mode.

You need to download the file package.mft from the link below and replace the currently present file in the folder where you installed the game under \Dist\win32 for example if you installed the game in the default folder it should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Battlefield Bad Company 2\Dist\win32) and that is it, you are ready to go. The file is from the game patch version 529843 and you can thank the user metti from the Nvidia forums for discovering this fix and sharing it with us, so you should try it out now while waiting for the game developers to address the issue with a new patch. Have in mind that this is for single player mode, and although it will work in multiplayer too it may create some issues in multiplayer mode!

- Download the package.mft file you need to replace to fix the crosshair in BFBC2…

Playing Moonbase Alpha, a Free Game by NASA in Stereo 3D Mode

Bloody — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:06:52 +0000

If you’ve missed the new free game from NASA (yes, a free game developed by/for the American government), then you might want to check out Moonbase Alpha now available on Steam. It seems that now NASA is looking to educate and train future astronauts through a free game, much like it was with the American Army getting new recruits through the previous free game called America’s Army… ;)

In Moonbase Alpha, you assume the role of an astronaut working to further human expansion and research on the Moon. Returning from a research expedition on the lunar surface, you witness a meteorite impact that cripples the life support capability of the recently established Moon base. With precious minutes ticking away, you and your team must repair and replace equipment in order to restore the oxygen production to the Moon settlement. There are several ways in which you can successfully restore the life support system of the lunar base, but since you are scored on the time spent to complete the task, you have to work effectively as a team, learn from decisions made in previous gaming sessions, and make intelligence decisions in order to top the leaderboards. And yes it is a multiplayer only online game where everyone is a real person that is quite interesting and might be fun to play for a while, but without a lot of excitement and action, so don’t get your hopes too high.

The game is based on Unreal engine, so playing it in stereoscopic 3D mode with 3D Vision as expected can bring out the typical issues, such as a problem with rendering the dynamic shadows and disabling these can help. Also since there is a lot of white, black and gray colors the game is prone to have some ghosting, but it still has a lot of potential to provide a quite realistic simulation with stereo 3D. The in-game HUD is rendered mostly in 2D, but that is not such a big issue and you might want to play a bit with the convergence settings to achieve best possible results. And you would probably want to lower the default brightness level a bit… And since the game is free all you need to have is a Steam account to download and play it, so it will be a shame not to try it, after all you might like it and who knows, you might be a future astronaut yourself… :P

- Visit the official website of the game Moonbase Alpha for more information…

Building Process of the Water Cooled Green Reactor 3D Test PC

Bloody — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:20:25 +0000

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.

- The complete Building Process of the Water Cooled Green Reactor 3D Test PC is here…

Time to Upgrade the Stereo 3D Testing Systems to Water Cooling…

Bloody — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:39:23 +0000

The summer is coming and it is time to get hot, really hot outside (depending on where you live of course), but with the temperatures increasing and all the hot hardware he have into out computers playing in stereo 3D can bring some issue. You should know that playing games in stereoscopic 3D mode is more demanding for your hardware and that does not mean only the GPU, but all other components and they all generate more heat. And with the the high-end video cards like GeForce GTX 4xx Fermi and Radeon HD 5xxx the heat dissipated is already quite a lot and the air cooling might sometimes give you quite high temperatures reaching even over 100 degrees Celsius or 212 degrees Fahrenheit and that is not good…

I’ve already started working on upgrading my stereoscopic 3D test PC using GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 5970 to water cooling for the quad-core AMD CPU and the Radeon HD 5970 GPU and removing the GTX 275 card (to be used for iZ3D testing). The other project I’ve started working on is building a new Nvidia-based water cooled PC that will use single GeForce GTX 480 videocard and and Intel i7 quad-core processor with everything stuffed inside a Big Corsair Obsidian 800D case (great and big case, on the photo above, ideal for more serious water cooling projects). I think it is about time to get a GTX 480 card for stereoscopic 3D gaming with 3D Vision, because the GTX 275 is a bit old already and the GT 9800Ms in SLI inside the test Dell M1730 laptops is even slower. But thanks to a lot of money going into the upgrade and new system, I’ve postponed the purchase of a new 3D HDTV for testing at least for the end of the year hoping for some better prices and more content and easier PC connectivity for gaming in stereo 3D by then. I’m planning to get a Panasonic VT20E Plasma 3D HDTV as this is what is currently available and the best choice so far from what I’ve seen, unless other competitors manage to offer something better meanwhile.

Say tuned for some more information about the water cooling upgrade for my current test 3D system and the new PC built especially for stereoscopic 3D gaming coming soon… and I do hope to have some benchmarks in stereo 3D with the GTX 480 in stereo 3D mode on some of the newer and popular game titles… ;)

Playing the Game Blur in Stereoscopic 3D Mode with 3D Vision

Bloody — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:28:38 +0000

The game Blur is now available and as I’ve written some time ago this is one of the titles for this summer that we all had high hopes for good results in stereoscopic 3D, and although it is a bit better than Split Second that also came out a few days ago, Blur is still not completely problem free when played in stereo 3D mode. Blur is yet another game game developed for console and ported for PC gamers, so the the default controls are a bit weird and you don’t get good graphic options that will allow you to have finer control over the graphic details and effects in the game…

The game Blur uses quite a lot of bright blue and white colors on dark backgrounds and that tends to create ghosting, especially if you decide to increase the depth level from the minimum setting. There is also an issue with rendering some lights at correct depth, and you can notice lighter halos around objects (the cars for example), especially if you increase the depth level a bit more than the minimum. And due to the lack of options to control the graphic details and effects and just having a quality level slider with a few levels, you’ll have to go to the lowest graphic settings to get rid of the halos, but this also makes the game graphics look way too simple, so it is not an option.

As I said by default the game needs to be played with the lowest level of depth that 3D Vision supports in order to minimize ghosting and light halos around objects, you can however tweak the convergence level a bit to have a slight pop-out effect, but still with low depth levels. You can try my custom convergence settings below if you wish to as currently thee is still no official 3D Vision profile even in the latest drivers for the game. But other than the ghosting, wrong lights rendering and the “glowing” halos around objects the game looks quite nice in stereo 3D mode and some people even find how Blur looks in stereo 3D great, but you should be aware that there are still some issues in the S3D mode. Maybe we’ll soon get a patch to fix these as the developer seems to be quick on releasing updates for the game, so we’ll be able to really enjoy the game in stereo 3D mode without visual issues and with higher depth levels…

- to download my custom convergence settings for the game Blur…

Nintendo Will Add Stereoscopic 3D Support in the New Nintendo 3DS

Bloody — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:22:01 +0000

Nintendo has dropped an interesting announcement on their website out of nowhere in something that can hardly be said to even resemble a proper press release (quoted below). The company plans to release a new update to their portable gaming console – the Nintendo DS, and the new version currently know as the 3DS will supposedly have an autostereoscopic 3D display built-in (no glasses required to see the stereo 3D image). Of course there is not a lot of information available yet and Nintendo will wait for E3 in June to give us more details on their plans for the 3DS console, with the most important question being if the S3D support will work with all titles (including already available games) or it will require new titles…

To Whom It May Concern:
Re: Launch of New Portable Game Machine

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “Nintendo 3DS” (temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.

“Nintendo 3DS” (temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125million units as of the end of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.

We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.

This is certainly good news for the gaming community, what we now need is more commitment from the movie and video producers to start creating more stereoscopic 3D video content, because that is what will drive most consumers to adopt the new 3D technologies. Hopefully Blu-ray 3D will be a good step in that direction, but lets wait for it a bit more and see what happens.

3D Vision Blog » stereoscopic 3d gaming

Stereo 3D Video of the HDMI Press Conference at CES 2012

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User Fix For The Stereo 3D Crosshair in Battlefield: Bad Company 2

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Playing Moonbase Alpha, a Free Game by NASA in Stereo 3D Mode

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Building Process of the Water Cooled Green Reactor 3D Test PC

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