3D Vision with Resident Evil 5

While the 3D effect is backwards-compatible with most previously released DirectX games, this year we have begun to see titles that were tailored specifically to work with NVIDIA’s system. The first to be officially designated “3D Vision Ready” was Resident Evil 5, Capcom’s action-packed survival game. The menus, cutscenes, and of course all gameplay is able to be displayed in eye-popping 3D. Instead of looking at a moving picture on a screen, it’s almost like you are gazing through a window into the game world.

If you’ve ever seen a 3D movie, you know that a major draw of the experience is the out-of-screen effects. Usually a ball or hand or whatever would move directly toward you and seem to come out of the screen, often to incite a reaction of astonishment or fear. Well, thanks to 3D Vision, the same sort of thing is now possible in games. Thrown objects miss their mark, blood splatters every which way, debris is ejected from explosions… each is an example of a moment when a part of the game flies straight at you!

The very method by which the stereoscopic illusion is achieved has an inherent performance impact; your video card simply has more work to do when displaying the game. The handy in-game benchmarking tool is fully 3D-compatible, so I’ve run a few tests to see what sort of effect it has on the framerate. The fixed test result is useful for comparing results with other machines, but the variable test is much more indicative of actual game performance. The resolution is 1680x1050 and all settings are on high, but motion blur is disabled as per official recommendation for achieving a “better 3D effect.”

3D Vision Performance with Resident Evil 5 DX10
GeForce GTX 275 GPU w/Core 2 Extreme X6800 @1680x1050 Screen Res
	Fixed	Variable
3D Vision Enabled	28 fps	48 fps
3D Vision Disabled	35 fps	77 fps

As you can see, playing with 3D enabled will cut your FPS down by a decent amount – 38% in the variable test and 20% in the fixed test. However, when you consider that there is a hard cap of 60 FPS when 3D Vision is active, it may not be fair to count anything over that when it’s disabled. If you want to look at it that way, it comes out to a 20% reduction in the variable test, which is consistent with the fixed test result.

On another note, I want to make a correction to something I noted in the RE5 review. Capcom told GameSpot that DX10 is required for 3D Vision, but I just discovered the contrary. In testing the AA on DX9, 3D Vision also worked perfectly well. So, to find out if there is any difference between the two modes, I ran the same tests again.

3D Vision Performance with Resident Evil 5 DX9
GeForce GTX 275 GPU w/Core 2 Extreme X6800 @1680x1050 Screen Res
	Fixed Performance Test	Variable Performance Test
3D Vision Enabled	24	43
3D Vision Disabled	36	75

There is no real performance variation between DX9 and DX10 with 3D Vision turned off. However, with it enabled, a discrepancy of 10-15% is seen. DX10 has the edge, presumably due to some of its inherent optimizations. Whether or not this was intended is unknown.