NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology has the potential to be huge some day, but considering its high cost, the performance hit/compatibility requirements needed to run some games, and finally the lack of affordable, high resolution displays (the two 22" monitors that support the tech are both limited to 1680x1050); it just isn’t ready for the majority of the gaming public today.
At a bare minimum, you’ll need the glasses, which sell for $200. Depending on whether or not you have a CRT capable of delivering refresh rates above 100Hz, you may also need a 120Hz LCD from Samsung or ViewSonic. According to their PRs, these monitors sell for $399. You can also buy them bundled together direct from nvidia.com for $598. Once you’ve got the monitor and glasses in place, you’ll then need a powerful graphics subsystem in order to deliver high frame rates. In addition, in some games you’ll also need to turn down some graphics settings in order to get 3D Vision to work properly.
Alternatively, you could take that same $200 and buy yourself a GTX 260 card, or the $600 and get a pair of 260s for SLI and still have money left over. By going this route you’ll get more performance and won’t have to compromise on graphics settings. Unlike 3D Vision your card will also work properly with all titles – at this moment 3D Vision only seems to shine in a handful of games.
With all that being said, we hope NVIDIA doesn’t give up on 3D Vision. Again, we strongly believe that given more time, this could be a really important product for NVIDIA in the future. If they’re able to produce more games with the quality of Left 4 Dead, 3D Vision could be a real game changer for the company.
NVIDIA says this is already in the works with games currently in development. This means we’ll see more games with out of screen effects and other jaw droppers.
Considering their history with SLI profiles, we have no reason to doubt that NVIDIA’s developer relations team can make this happen with profiles and built-in support for 3D Vision. Besides Intel, if anyone’s got the resources to pull this off, it’s NVIDIA.
Besides support from game developers, NVIDIA’s also going to need a wider variety of LCDs capable of running 3D Vision, as well as cheaper display offerings: $400 is too much to pay for a 1680x1050 display.
In our opinion, the glasses themselves also need to hit the $99 price mark as quickly as possible.
Once the 3D Vision glasses can hit the sub-$100 mark, and there’s a wider variety of cheaper 120Hz displays out there, 3D Vision can begin to take off. We see no reason why this tech couldn’t be as significant to NVIDIA as other initiatives such as SLI and PhysX. After all, 3D Vision helps NVIDIA sell more GeForce GPUs, and has the added benefit of locking users into the GeForce ecosystem once they purchase the glasses.
We’ll probably need to revisit 3D Vision a year or so from now to see how the tech is progressing. Hopefully by then we’ll see more games with quality levels as high as Left 4 Dead (Spore and World of Warcraft are supposed to look pretty good with 3D Vision), while prices will hopefully be low enough for more consumers to stomach. That's the hope at least, we'll see if it pans out...
Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Preview Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is a standalone expansion pack and follow-up to developer Stardock's previous game in the series, subtitled War of Magic. That 4X strategy game was highly-anticipated and slated to compete with games such as Sid Meier's Civilization V for your turn-based strategy play-time, but was released in an incredibly broken and unfinished state that it never fully recovered from. Lead designer Brad Wardell apologized profusely to fans and set out with his team to go back to the drawing board and try again.
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ANNO 2070 Review
The year is 2070. The majority of life on Earth was devastated when global sea levels surged after the melting of the polar ice caps. Swaths of previously habitable land are now deep underwater, and sovereign nations are a relic of the past. But there is still hope...
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Hear that? It's the sound of the largest computer chip manufacturer in the world churning out new processors to power your gaming rig. This week, Intel is launching their next generation of Core CPUs, code-named Ivy Bridge. Like last year's Sandy Bridge chips, they're low-power, quad-core powerhouses that also feature integrated graphics processors. Want to find out more? Maybe check out a whole bunch of performance benchmarks on both the CPU and graphics sides of things? Well you can, in today's review!
Intel Z77 Chipset & DZ77GA-70K Motherboard Overview
Looking forward to those new Ivy Bridge CPUs? In anticipation of their release later this month, Intel has already unveiled the new Series 7 chipsets designed especially to take advantage of what will be the 3rd-generation of Core processors. In today's article, we take a look at the architecture of the enthusiast variant, the Z77, and how it's used in the Intel Desktop Extreme DZ77GA-70K motherboard. Even if you're not particularly interested in the motherboard itself, you'll probably want to see some of the new features that come along with it, so read on!
Mass Effect 3 PC Review
This latest release from EA/BioWare is the final entry in their trilogy of sci-fi action RPGs, putting you in a dire situation: rally the troops to save Earth at all costs. There was a lot of hype surrounding the final act of what has been a vast and highly-customizable story-telling experience, and the reception among many hardcore fans has been less than stellar. Even people that haven't played the game have probably heard about all the nerd rage going on over Mass Effect 3's ending...
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Batman: Arkham City PC Review Batman: Arkham City is the sequel to 2009’s smash-hit action game Batman: Arkham Asylum. As the name suggests, you will be reprising your role as the Caped Crusader and going against an even larger 'prison' filled with Gotham's criminals and villains. A textbook example on how to do a proper sequel, Arkham City takes what worked in the original, excised or improved upon what didn’t, and elevated everything to an even greater scope. The PC version suffered from a few months of delay, but in that time, Rocksteady worked closely to NVIDIA to implement some familiar technologies from the last game, such as PhysX and 3D Vision, along with new DirectX 11 optimizations. But how well was the whole package executed? Read on to find out!
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The PC version of the game promises enhanced graphical fidelity, standard RPG trimmings such as hotkeys and quick-save, as well as unbridled mod support, something we’ll all be thankful for once they release that SDK. Skyrim has already sold millions of copies and set records for play-time on Steam... Find out why in today's review, which happens to be one of the biggest and most in-depth articles on the subject out there!
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3D Vision performance hit
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