A few days ago EA and Crytek have officially announced the upcoming game Crysis 3 scheduled for release in the spring next year and today they have released the first official gameplay trailer (embedded above). What they’ve forgot to confirm however is if Crysis 3 will support stereoscopic 3D mode as Crysis 2 does and if it does will there also be a full dual rendering and not only their 2D+Depth approach they currently use. The game Crysis 3 will be based on the CryEngine 3 and that engine does have native stereoscopic 3D support, so it will be plain stupid not to have the support available in the game, especially after the good feedback of the stereo 3D support in Crysis 2. Not to mention how the CryEngine’s stereoscopic 3D support is being advertised as a zero implementation solution with the game developer not having to do anything special to have S3D implemented in his title based on the engine. However we still don’t have any official confirmation about Crysis 3 having stereoscopic 3D support…
Now, we all know why Crysis has developed the 2D+Depth approach in CryEngine 3 or as they call it Screen Space Re-Projection Stereo (SSRS), all in order to ensure they can offer a decent stereoscopic 3D experience not only to PC gamers, but also to PS3 and Xbox 360 gamers willing to play in stereo 3D as well. Using the SSRS solution you get just a little performance loss when playing in stereoscopic 3D mode as opposed to the more serious performance hit that a full dual rendering introduces, but the later also does provide a more spectacular and realistic volume experience. And since we did not get full dual rendering stereo 3D mode in Crysis 2 via an update, a lot of gamers are hoping this will be introduced in Crysis 3, at least for PC gamers that can always upgrade their hardware to handle the extra performance requirements. As adding this opposed to the 2D+Depth approach is not possible for consoles where you’ll have to sacrifice details in order to ensure full dual camera rendering in order to fit in the performance capabilities of the PS3 or Xbox 360. Considering that Crysis 3 is scheduled for the spring 2013 or in about a year from now there is quite a lot of time for Crytek to add additional stereoscopic 3D rendering modes, but it is not yet know if they will indeed do that or not. Meanwhile they have started taking pre-orders of Crysis 3 Hunter Edition already that includes some extra bonuses for the most eager gamers.
Ubisoft has announced that the PC version of the game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will be available in stores and for digital download on June 12th and that it will be supporting stereoscopic 3D. The most interesting thing here however is the fact that it is not the usual stereo 3D support announcement that we see coming with Nvidia’s 3D vision Ready game titles, or the more rare AMD HD3D nativr support announcements, this time it is “TriDef stereoscopic support”. Now, that does not mean that you will not be able to play the game in stereo 3D mode using other 3D-capable solutions such as 3D Vision or AMD HD3D, or even with iZ3D, it just means that the game will be optimized for best results when using DDD’s TriDef 3D software.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier PC version features:
- PC high standard visuals (DX11 renderer, new high-quality assets, new post process effects, multi-monitor solutions support, TriDef stereoscopic support).
- DirectX11 enhanced: tessellation (for soft 3D models), compute shaders-based realistic lighting (for global illumination), volumetric fog.
- Online widget: Party, Friends and Ghost Feed functionality can be accessed at any moment from any screen
- Extended party functionality: simplified and more flexible invitation system
- Party text chat
- Uplay Friends system
- Fully customizable controls for the localized keyboards
The stereoscopic 3D support however is just one of the extra features that Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will support as it will be a DX11 game title and will also offer multi-monitor solutions support (supposedly will look good in stereo 3D multi-monitor setups as well). The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 console versions of the game are scheduled to be released on May 22nd in North America and there is no word about stereoscopic 3D support in them, so they will most likely not have S3D support.
Remedy Entertainment, the developers of the game Alan Wake have published an official Patch “Roadmap” for the PC version of the game, so that users may know what to expect to be fixed and/or improved with the upcoming patches. It is a list of what to expect in short terms and a few things that may be addressed in long term in possible future patches and the good news is that the stereoscopic 3D will most likely be improved, the not so good news is that it will probably not happen anytime soon. The list published by Remedy that you can find below is probably not very detailed and covers most of the things that will be addressed with a patch coming this week and another one coming next week. For example SLI support should be coming soon, hopefully (yep, it is not present in the just released new video drivers from Nvidia) and the game Alan Wake could be quite demanding to the video hardware, so multi-GPU support is a must have feature, so that if you have the hardware it can be fully utilized.
Patch 1 – This Week
- Fix problems of game not moving forward / triggering properly after videos. (Workaround: avoid pressing space or enter when those videos trigger, restarting the chapter helps)
- Nvidia tree flicker – if we manage to catch it. We are doing our best.
- Unofficial support for 640×480 and 800×600 resolution through command line
- Fix that blur occasionally gets re-enabled even if -noblur specified
- Add “rigidcamera” command line option for those who are sensitive to our current mouse/camera controls.
- Add possibility to bind mouse buttons 4 and 5
- Fix that the Developer Video Commentary volume is more sensible
- Fix that Localized cinematic audio volume is not too loud and adjustable
- Fix that going to menus during a cine skips the cinematic when you return to game
- Fix that controller ruble works even without weird workarounds of enabling it with keyboard
- Prevent binding controller keys and thus preventing weird problems
- Real Traditional Chinese translation for added PC strings. Apologies for the current Simplified Chinese in menus.
- Better CPU thread assignment for 3-Core AMD machines (smoother gameplay)
Patch 2 – Next Week
- Fix crashes when using alt-tab during loading
- Solve “File IO Failure” issue when unable to write to My Documents
- Somehow offer Latin-American Localizations through Steam
- Hopefully add a free camera for those who want to explore the world
- We’ll try to get SLI support in but can’t promise that yet…
- Continue sorting out other problems users have been having
The “Improve Stereoscopic 3D” is listed as something that may or may not be addressed in a future patch for the game, probably it can be prioritized if a lot of people with 3D-capable hardware that already have purchased the game expecting it to work well in stereo 3D mode show they are not satisfied with what they currently have. So feel free to express your opinion about the stereo 3D support of Alan Wake in the official game forum here. So that Remedy may have that up in their priority list and bring the “Poor” 3D Vision rating that the game just got from Nvidia to something better and I doubt that Nvidia won’t be willing to help them work out some of the issues that Alan Wake currently has in stereo 3D mode, especially the shadows and lights not rendering properly. And for the time being you can continue playing the game in non-stereo 3D mode as it actually is not a bad game, especially if you have been waiting for the PC version to come out for quite a while now that it has finally made its appearance. And the game’s developer could save all of the negative feedback from the stereoscopic 3D gaming community if they did not tease us with information and photos suggesting that the game should provide good stereoscopic 3D experience, and when it finally came out it actually shows very disappointing results…
