3D Vision gaming impressions

Setting it all up

Once you’ve got the hardware all setup, the software install is pretty seamless. A handy wizard walks you through the graphics driver installation, as well as the stereoscopic 3D driver install, then you simply put on the glasses and follow a few prompts to properly setup the glasses. Here we should mention that 3D Vision support is limited exclusively to Windows Vista, NVIDIA doesn’t provide stereoscopic 3D Vision drivers for Windows XP.

From start to finish the whole process should take just a few minutes, NVIDIA really deserves kudos for how seamlessly they’ve set everything up. This is important, as the next topic, game compatibility, requires heavy involvement on NVIDIA’s part.

Gaming with 3D Vision

One downside to 3D Vision is that it’s so new that games haven’t been designed to take advantage of it. To get around this, NVIDIA has created 3D Vision profiles for most of today’s latest games. These profiles work much like NVIDIA’s SLI profiles, automatically detecting the game’s .exe and setting up the stereoscopic effects appropriately for that game. NVIDIA says that 3D Vision works with over 350 games and applications, with a complete list of supported games here.

If you follow the link you’ll see that NVIDIA provides a rating for each 3D Vision-ready game, with games rated “excellent” supposedly delivering the very best experience, with additional ratings of “good” and “fair”.

The problem is, since the games weren’t designed with 3D Vision in mind, even many of the games rated excellent must have their eye candy effects reduced in order for 3D Vision to work properly. Often times you’ll have to turn off shadows and advanced lighting effects. Motion blur is another popular effect you also have to disable in some games. In addition, in multiple shooters you’ll also have to turn off the default crosshair and use NVIDIA’s 3D crosshair, otherwise you’ll see two crosshairs.

Fortunately, one benefit of profiling hundreds of games is NVIDIA knows in advance what graphics settings cause problems in specific games and offers suggestions on what settings you should use for the best 3D Vision experience. These suggestions pop up automatically in the bottom right corner of the game you’re playing and can be toggled on or off.

So does 3D Vision actually work? Yes and no. Under ideal circumstances, the experience can be jaw-dropping, with some games sporting pop-out effects where game objects like explosions, billboards, and other items appear to literally pop outside of the screen.

In other cases there are visual glitches and quirks that are downright annoying. We should also note that games universally look darker behind the 3D Vision glasses when compared against the traditional monitor, requiring you to crank up the brightness to offset this.

Because the experience can literally vary from game to game, we’ve provided the following breakdown, including NVIDIA’s official ratings and notes on what settings to use, with our thoughts providing subjective analysis of how the various games look and feel with 3D Vision enabled:

Call of Duty: World At War

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: N/A (unfortunately our Direct2Drive version of WaW wasn’t picked up correctly, so the notes didn’t work but 3D certainly did.)

FiringSquad’s thoughts: We had a lot of fun with World At War. Unlike some of the other games tested, we were able to crank up the 3D depth within just a minute or two of playing the game. One item that was a bit disorienting however was text. Like previous CoD games, text pops up in World at War ID’ing friendly NPCs (Sgt Smith, Cpl Brown, etc, etc), not to mention prompting you when you need to reload. Because of the 3D effect, this text sometimes appears as if it’s over the NPCs (or even enemies) instead of to the side of them which can throw you off when multiple things are going on at once.

Unfortunately, spent cartridges from your gun don’t pop out of the screen, but you do feel as if you could reach out and catch each one of them if you wanted! Another really immersive moment is looking down sniper scopes, as well as manning turrents where your sights appear to line up dimensionally in front of your intended target.

World at War deserves its excellent rating. After Left 4 Dead, this was our second favorite 3D Vision title.

Call of Duty 4

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Turn off Glow and DOF

FiringSquad’s thoughts: Considering how immersive World at War looked with 3D Vision, we were surprised by the lack of depth from Call of Duty 4. Sure, many (but not all) of the same scenarios that looked best in World at War also allowed 3D Vision to shine in CoD 4, but for whatever reason it just wasn’t as compelling.

Other than the sniper level, where you spend a large amount of time looking down your scope, 3D Vision was pretty underwhelming. Fortunately, since it’s based on an older game engine, you don’t have to make too many compromises visually to get 3D Vision working with CoD 4.

Crysis

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Good
NVIDIA Notes: N/A

FiringSquad’s thoughts: No matter what we tried we couldn’t get this game to work with 3D Vision. Half the time when we’d load Crysis we’d get a blank screen, but the system had not crashed. We have no clue how this game obtained a rating of “good”.

Fallout 3

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Use NVIDIA Crosshair

FiringSquad’s thoughts: We noticed weird artifacts in Fallout 3. The area where the clouds and sky met had a strange moiré like effect on them. It looked as if 3D Vision was trying to add depth to the clouds, placing them in front of the sky, but the moiré pattern just threw everything off.

Everywhere else, 3D Vision ran well.

Far Cry 2

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Set Post Effects to low, Set Shadows to medium Turn off Bloom

FiringSquad’s thoughts: Unfortunately in order for 3D Vision to work in Far Cry 2, you have to run the game in DX9 mode and turn off many of the effects that make the game look so good. Even then, the game’s fire just doesn’t look right with 3D Vision, smoke and water also seem off.

When compared against Far Cry 2 running with very high visual settings in DX10, the compromises required for 3D Vision in addition to the glitches add up to a subpar experience. You’re best off disabling 3D Vision for Far Cry 2.

Left 4 Dead

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Excellent
NVIDIA Notes: Clouds at wrong depth setting, film grain to off provides better stereo effect

FiringSquad’s thoughts: Once you’ve seen Left 4 Dead in 3D Vision, it’s tough to go back to playing the game without it. Words really can’t describe how incredibly cool Left 4 Dead looks with 3D Vision. From the way blood splatters against the screen when you take damage, to the way smoke from your pistols seems to hover in the air in front of you, 3D Vision takes a very dated Source game engine in Left 4 Dead and turns it into a graphical masterpiece. This is easily one of the most impressive things we’ve seen in the last few years.

Mirror’s Edge

NVIDIA 3D Vision Rating: Good
NVIDIA Notes: Incorrect reflections, self shadows render incorrectly, light halos are 2D, use NVIDIA lasersight

FiringSquad’s thoughts: To be honest, we were pretty disappointed by this title, especially considering NVIDIA’s efforts with EA/DICE and PhysX. Based on this, we assumed they worked heavily with them on 3D Vision as well, but this obviously isn’t the case. As NVIDIA’s own notes indicate, many items are rendered poorly, and we saw ghosting and other issues. Good is probably overstating the 3D Vision implementation in Mirror’s Edge.

You’re going to need a pretty powerful graphics setup in order to run 3D Vision with fluid frame rates. This is because the technology comes with a pretty significant performance hit. How significant? Check out the benchmarks on the next page….