Oil Rush is pretty much the first real commercially available game based on the impressive Unigine engine that has up until recently been used mostly for benchmarking video cards using the very popular Heaven benchmark. The game has been developed by the makers of the Unigine engine itself, and since the more recent versions of the engine have official stereoscopic 3D support, the game also supports it. Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control that combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS title with the fun of Tower Defence type of games provide in a vast water world with very nice and detailed graphics. The game is multiplatform, so it is not available only for Windows, but the most stereoscopic 3D features are supported in the Windows version, including support for 3D Vision. Oil Rush is a game that you may want to try playing in stereo 3D mode as it does work very well.
Oil Rush Supports DX9, DX10, DX11 and OpenGL rendering modes in the Windows version that I’ve tried. With the OpenGL support for stereo 3D being limited to only anaglyph mode, while in all DirectX modes you get full support for anaglyph, Side by Side, iZ3D monitors as well as 3D Vision. Have in mind that you will need to activate Vsync in order to be able to use the game in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision. There is no official 3D Vision profile for the game available in the latest video drivers, even in the latest beta released just a few days ago, but activating the 3D Vision mode from the game launcher does produce very good results in stereo 3D mode. You can also run the game with disabled stereo 3D mode and then activate 3D Vision when the game loads, but then you may experience some issues with setting up the best parameters for playing the game comfortably and also have some visual artifacts.
Activating the 3D Vision mode from the game’s launcher apparently loads different settings and also disables the convergence adjustment, but there is also a stereo 3D effect slider in the game’s options menu. With the 3D Vision mode active and all the depth pushed to the maximum the game still looks a bit flat, especially for people that are used to play with a lot of depth. But as I’ve said not activating the 3D Vision mode from the game menu and forcing it directly inside the game, although leaves convergence adjustment unlocked and allows higher depth adjustment, may lead to having some visual issues and thus resulting in not so good experience, so you may be better off with the official 3D Vision mode activated and a bit flatter image. With the official 3D Vision mode activated from the launcher you will notice that the cursor is rendered in 2D at the screen depth, but that isn’t that much of a bother actually, and most of the HUD is also rendered at screen depth, although there are some elements that may slightly pop-out and that can create unpleasant feeling when moving the cursor over them. Other than that there aren’t any visual issues with the game running in stereo 3D mode with the 3D Vision option activated from the game launcher, so it is something that you may wish to try yourself and if you do you are welcome to share your feedback about the game below. The good thing is that the game developer is quite actively working on improving the stereo 3D support in the game and getting rid of the issues…
Update: Apparently the game runs directly without going trough the launcher pictured above for the Steam version, so if you’ve got the Steam and not the standalone version of the game, then try running it trough the “launcher_x86.bat” file located in “C:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\oil rush\”, instead of directly trough Steam. Also the game developer has announced in their official forum that they plan to address the stereo 3D issues in the next 1.03 update that should be available next week.
We already know that the Unigine engine is stereoscopic 3D ready, but in the latest Unigine Heaven Benchmark version 2.1 this feature of the engine is being demonstrated. In the new version of the engine benchmark called Heaven there is an option to officially enable stereoscopic 3D rendering with the stereo 3D modes support being: anaglyph, separate images, 3D Vision and iZ3D. I’m still wondering what exactly does the “separate images” mean, as at first I thought it refers to Side by Side mode, but it it not and I don’t see any difference in the image when running the benchmark in it. Other than that the Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1 really looks great in stereo 3D mode, as I’ve tried the 2.0 version with 3D Vision and there were still some visual flaws. In the latest 3D Vision driver there is also a profile for the Unigine Heaven Benchmark. I was also quite surprised to see a native implementation for the iZ3D Monitors that does not require you to have the iZ3D Driver installed on your PC and the Unigine Heaven Benchmark also does look quite good with it…
You have probably already seen the Unigine Heaven benchmark that is one of the first demos of actual game engines supporting DX11 and Tesselation (the Unigine game engine is also Stereo 3D ready), and if you haven’t you should take a look at the video above. Have in mind that the scene in the video looks like that only when running on DX11-capable hardware and with active Tessellation (only on Radeon HD 5xxx series video cards at the moment and will be supported on the upcoming GF100 “Fermi”). What you should take a not at is the level of detail that the Tessellation can add to objects in the virtual world you are playing in, for example: the rocks on the road, the walls of the buildings, the rooftops even the dragon statue looks much better and with a lot of additional detail. And when talking about stereoscopic 3D having also support for tessellation and actually using it in a game will add a lot more detail to objects making them even more realistic… by changing for example the flat rocky road to a one with uneven and bumpy rocks that actually have different depth are are much more like the real thing. You should consider the fact that with tessellation used right the 3D objects using it will not only look better on a 2D screen, but they will actually feel more real when you are viewing them with a 3D screen. This all means that tessellation is something that you should look for in upcoming games especially if you plan to play them with some sort of a stereoscopic 3D setup, but don’t be too glad and in a hurry about that…
I’ve already mentioned that at the moment only the latest ATI GPUs do have hardware support for DirectX 11 and Tessellation, but then again ATI still does not have official stereoscopic 3D support on their own. This does not mean you cannot use some sort of a stereoscopic 3D setup with an ATI hardware, but you need to also rely on additional software to support the respective technology. At the moment such software (universal by the way, working on both ATI and Nvidia hardware) is the iZ3D Driver and DDD TriDef, but there is another catch with these two. Actually more like two catches, the first – both software solutions still do not have good support or such support at all for active shutter glasses, and the second – they still do not even support DirectX 10, let alone DX 11. There is information however that both companies are working on adding DX10 support for Stereoscopic 3D and there were some promises to bring it out in January this year, but we are still waiting and the month is almost over. And then again we’ll probaly need at least a few more months until DirectX 11 support can be introduced – just enough time for more games that do actually take advantage start appearing and more mainstream and affordable hardware from both big names in the consumer VGA market.
You can say that Nvidia has a somewhat better position at this moment because their 3D Vision already does support stereoscopic 3D gaming with DirectX 10 and there is no DX11 yet, just because the company still does not have GPUs that support it on the market. A lot of people are waiting for the first such cards based on the “Fermi” architecture for quite some time already and the GF100 series are due to be out in the market most likely in the beginning of March. It would be quite interesting if Nvidia does introduce DirectX 11 support for 3D Vision too at that time as this will give them even stronger position in the S3D field, just because they don’t have to rely on external software solution they can afford to do that, but it does not mean they will. Still we’ll also need some good games that do take advantage of DX11 features and can use Tessellation to do things like the ones we see in the Unigine demo above and that could take some more time as we all played the same “game” not too long ago DX10.
But no matter how long we’ll have to wait for things to happen if you are into stereoscopic 3D gaming, then you should be looking forward to DX 11 hardware and software that does take advantage of Tessellation to make the game world much more realistic and appealing. I just hope that we are going to have games that do look like the demo in the video above and of course are normally playable even in stereoscopic 3D mode…
