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Is Your Gaming Future in Stereo 3D?

Wed, Sep 17, 2008

Featured, Interview, News

Over twenty-four hours into the Guinness World Records non-stop LAN party at NVISION 08, I seem to recall hearing a pair of the volunteers behind me talk about what would likely happen to me and my weary compatriots at the 30-hour mark. Apparently, that’s when we might begin to hallucinate. The next morning, our ordeal complete, I did indeed see strange, fantastic visions — but they came not from the depths of my own skull, but a NVISION display where Spore, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft and more seemed to leap right off the screens of shiny new ViewSonic monitors.

What I was seeing, the nearest exhibitor told me, were the fruits of NVIDIA’s new push into stereoscopic 3D.

Even in my sleep-deprived state I was impressed by the vibrant effects I saw on display, but I immediately began to harbor doubts. Stereoscopic 3D games have been around for decades, but whether the headaches were physical or financial, barriers to entry have always been high and the the technology has never quite taken off. A few years back, longtime supporter NVIDIA themselves inexplicably dropped out of the ring after years of stereoscopic 3D driver updates.

So, why now? Why has NVIDIA chosen this moment to jump back into the game? Has stereoscopic 3D changed such that NVIDIA believes it is once again worth their while? Or do they plan to drive adoption themselves? Most importantly, will S-3D finally be a worthwhile investment for gamers?

In part one of a series on the current state and future viability of stereoscopic 3D technology for gaming, GameCyte speaks with Andrew Fear, senior product manager at NVIDIA and a seven-year veteran currently responsible for marketing the new initiative to demanding gamers like ourselves. Join us for a lengthy discussion of NVIDIA’s current campaign, the underlying technology, and more than one glimpse into NVIDIA’s future plans.

GameCyte: Please tell us about this new stereoscopic 3D initiative.

Andrew Fear: What we started off with was an initiative to highlight some of the new features that you can only get with a GeForce graphics card processor; we call it our Force Within campaign. We’re trying to educate people about the four key technologies that we believe make GeForce a unique product. There’s physics, which is the ability for a game developer to create better realistic effects in their game which represent what happens in the real world, accelerated on a GeForce. There’s CUDA, which is a new application programming language which allows you to accelerate things like the Folding@home client for protein research, things like badaboom, which is a video transcoding application.

There’s also NVIDIA SLI, which is our high-end multi-GPU technology, and the number-one platform in the world for multi-GPU, and then of course stereoscopic 3D.

The reason why we’re highlighting that one is because stereoscopic 3D is something we’ve been involved with for over 10 ten years now. We’ve traditionally been releasing drivers for it; we kind of stopped doing driver releases for a while because we kind of went internal for a little bit, decided to take a step back and look at the whole industry and decide what would be the best path we could take to grow the industry in a big way and improve the quality of the experience.

Specifically at NVISION, we were showing new glasses designed by NVIDIA that we’ve been working on for almost two years. We’ve been working on them internally; haven’t really talked about it publicly for a while. At NVISION, what we showcased was this new glasses design, working on two types of displays. ViewSonic now has what we like to call a “pure 120 hertz” display, meaning that it actually takes a 120 Hz input and actually drives it at that frequency. It doesn’t do any internal conversion, so it maintains all of those frames perfectly. We were also running on a high-end Mitsubishi DLP.

GameCyte: The 3-D ready Mitsubishi DLPs have been around for a little while, correct?

AF: Yes, they’ve been around for about two years.

GameCyte: Were they supported by NVIDIA 3D technology back when they were released, or was this something they were doing on their own?

AF: There are other companies out there that make software drivers that work with our graphics processors to enable the 3D on their high-definition DLP, but this year I think Mitsubishi realizes that the driver they had, and the glasses they had – well, I can’t speak for them, but I know they had limited game support and the glasses design wasn’t necessarily the best for a gamer, I would say.

So when we started approaching Mitsubishi about working together, I think they got excited – I hope they got excited — about getting better game support, better technology support and the very high quality glasses design we were working on.

GameCyte: You say NVIDIA has supported stereoscopic 3D for over 10 years now… How did that start?

AF: At the time, we brought over some of the key engineers that used to work at Metabyte, which was a company that was around in the mid- to late-90’s. I don’t remember the exact year – but they came over and we started developing a driver that was native to NVIDIA that could automatically convert games to work in a stereoscopic 3D mode.

The really powerful thing about the driver is that it can convert any game with positional depth information to work with a 3D-ready display. It’s a very powerful statement for a game developer and there’s a lot of value added for them. They don’t need to create a special version of their game. They don’t need to rewrite their game engine. They don’t need to do any of that to make their game work; our drivers can automatically do that for them.

GameCyte: Do 3D games (and by 3D I mean three-dimensional, not stereoscopic) typically have that depth information, regardless of whether they were designed for 3D or not?

I would say, if you look at pretty much every game written today, they’re all written with that 3D depth information that we can take advantage of. I think – and I did this exercise about three months ago – I went to the NPD data released since 2005, and I tracked the top 100 games to see whether they were rendered in 3D and if we could take advantage of them with our driver.

In 2005, I think it was 80 percent of the top 100 games; in 2006, I want to say it was about 85 percent. In 2007, it was close to 90, and I think it leveled out at about 92, 93 percent the last time I checked.

If you look at pretty much every major game today – like take for example, Spore, Unreal Tournament 3, StarCraft II, World of Warcraft – all of these games have depth information that we can take advantage of.

GameCyte: I’ve heard, and I’ve noticed, in fact, that when shown on a 3D display these games can have problems with overlays.

AF: That’s a good question, but let me try to explain that, because often a lot of people think that they’re rendered wrong. We actually find, when working with developers that actually do game testing with end-users, that when they’re rendering a scene, game developers typically draw all their HUD elements at a depth value – we call it the W value – of 1. From a lighting, modeling, everything-else perspective, they want to make sure that the HUD is always in front of everything else on screen, and a W value of 1 means that it is rendered exactly at screen depth.

For the most part, we actually recommend that game developers do render that at screen depth, the reason being that the HUD has text information, like your chat session for Team Fortress 2, and we’ve found through anecdotal testing that when the stereo value has no separation (which is at screen depth), people can read that much easier. So having that HUD at screen depth is actually a good thing, the way we look at it.

GameCyte: I was told at NVISION that NVIDIA has actually gone back into the code for some games and optimized them for stereo 3D. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

AF: It’s true that the game developer doesn’t need to do anything special to make their game work; we can take their data and convert it to work, dimensionalize it to go into and come out of the screen, but that being said there are always problems where a game developer might have done a rendering effect that isn’t compatible with our driver. What we do is work with the game developer to help them fix that and make it better. We’re doing this right now with new games coming out.

We had done this in the past, but not as much as we’re doing today, only because I think now the game developers are seeing that there’s a more focused effort coming from NVIDIA, there are better 3D displays on the market, and we’re really trying to build a complete solution for them.

One way we do this is kind of like what we do for NVIDIA SLI – what we do is we create a game profile in our driver, and that profile recognizes the game, sets up all the right rendering effects to make sure the game scales properly, and gives you the best performance benefit.

But on the back side of that, we always do work with game developers, and if there’s a way they’re doing a rendering in their game or something that makes it so the SLI scaling isn’t as good as we’d like, we’re going to go work with them to make sure that it’s optimized to scale faster. Same idea with stereoscopic.

GameCyte: So you had offered game developers this kind of support in the past, or is this part of the new initiative?

AF: We’d offered support in the past, but I think a lot of game developers had been reluctant to really put a lot of effort into it, and I think the reason has been that there has not been a lot of 3D-ready displays in the market, there has not been a really high-quality glasses solution, and I don’t think the time was right. I think now that we’ve gone through and showed them that there are going to be two million 3D-ready DLPs on the market by the end of this year; there are tons of new higher-refresh rate LCDs coming out from ViewSonic; we’re building these new glasses, and putting a lot more into it; I think once they’ve seen all that, they’ll think “Wow, you know what, this really is going to be a big market, and it’s an entirely new way for an end-user to view my game,” and they’ll want to support that.

GameCyte: So why now? Is all of this technology just now catching up to 3D, or is NVIDIA driving this?

AF: I think it’s a bit of both. How long have you been using a PC, let me ask you that?

GameCyte: I’m not that old, mind you, but I have been using one since… let’s say 1988.

AF: So you had an analog CRT, right?

GameCyte: Oh, certainly. Not that long ago, actually.

AF: Exactly, exactly. So what we observed, starting around four to five years ago, going to tons of LAN events and talking to gamers, was that the industry was slowly transitioning towards LCDs. But gamers traditionally weren’t, and the reason why gamers weren’t transitioning towards LCD was that the quality wasn’t as good, meaning that the refresh rate wasn’t that fast, the grey-to-grey response time wasn’t that good, the color, the brightness, the saturation, all of those were limiting factors.

So we kind of sat back and observed that, and we started talking to a lot of display manufacturers, and found out that natural industry transition was towards faster refresh rates, better grey-to-grey response time, and many things that the CRTs already had. We looked at all that and said “Hey, you know what, if we worked with these guys that are building these 120 Hz LCDs, with all these things in the display that are good for a gamer in general, if we just work with them a little bit to change it slightly, we could enable a really high-quality stereoscopic solution on an LCD.”

GameCyte: When would you say the decision to nudge them was made?

AF: I’d say probably about two years ago. Like I said, it was a natural industry transition that was happening anyway, and all we did was look at it saying, “How can we enable that?” We saw the specs of what was coming, we started working with display partners, talked to them to find out what they were doing, and helped them make it better…

GameCyte: So present day, we have the NVIDIA glasses and the ViewSonic monitors. Can you tell me how the technology has now changed from how it appeared in 2001, or even 2006 when NVIDIA stepped away from the market?

AF: The big thing that’s different about the monitors today is that while back then, there were a lot of analog CRTs and some projector solutions –- the analog CRTs could deliver a pretty good refresh rate up to 1024×768, maybe even 1280×1024 –- people were still expecting better quality, better experiences, faster response time.

The ViewSonic has what I like to call “pure 120 hertz,” because I want to make sure you understand that it’s different than when you walk into Best Buy and you see Sony or Samsung marketing a 120 hertz, 65-inch LCD. That’s different than what ViewSonic has. That monitor you see in Best Buy, I’m not dinging it for falsely representing itself, but what it does is it takes a 60 Hz input over HDMI and converts it internally into 120 Hz, and then displays at 120 Hz. It does framerate conversion, or black frame insertion, or a number of other things in order to convert that 60 Hz signal into 120.

GameCyte: So we wouldn’t be able to get 3D on that?

AF: You can’t do 3D on that, because that type of technique would still give you a shuddering effect and eyestrain — because it would still only be 30 frames per second per eye.

So the difference we have now with the ViewSonic is that it takes 120 Hz input, meaning it will display every single frame coming in. It doesn’t do any conversion, doesn’t do any black frame insertion; it enables 120 Hz at a native refresh rate. Once you have that, that allows you to get a native 60 Hz per eye, and you get a higher-quality stereo effect without headache or eyestrain.

Now the difference between the glasses we had in 2001 and those we have now: back in 2001, I would say a lot of the glasses solutions were still wired, so you were tethered to the PC. There were some wireless solutions, but they typically operated on standard batteries – I don’t remember any rechargeable ones. Also, if you’ve ever seen any of them, you’ll know they weren’t the most stylish glasses.

What we tried to do was focus on what the gamer wanted, and the opinions we heard over and over again included, “I don’t want to be tethered to my PC.” So we immediately decided that it had to be wireless. They also said, “I hate replacing batteries. Why can’t you make it work just like an iPod,” meaning “can’t I just recharge it?” That’s why you can charge it over USB. A lot of these guys said, “The reason why I don’t want to change batteries is because I game for five hours a night,” so we made our batteries last for 40 hours. On one charge, it’s good for 40 hours.

And the last thing they said is that “they aren’t that stylish,” meaning they’re flimsy, they’re not really high quality, “they’re not what I’d expect for a quality experience,” so what we tried to focus on was giving you something a little more stylish, something you’d like to wear.

GameCyte: What about comfort?

AF: Comfort was a big thing as well for us. We’re very conscious of the weight of our glasses, which is why although they’re wireless and rechargeable, it isn’t significant. Also, when our glasses hit the market, they’ll have multiple nosepieces so if you have a different style of face you can change out the nosepieces to make sure it’s compatible with your face type. We also made sure our glasses fit over standard prescription glasses.

We looked at data from ophthalmology reports which said upwards of 50% of the population are using glasses on a computer, and said “gee, if we don’t design our glasses to fit over prescription lenses, we’re going to leave 50% of the market out.”

GameCyte: That’s a very intriguing statistic…

AF: There’s a trend of nearsightedness in the population, I think. I don’t know if it’s because people are staring at monitors all day…

GameCyte: ‘laughs’ I was just going to ask…

AF: Who knows, right? But we did this research and found out about it, and then did our own anecdotal testing. In an informal survey of our own team we found that it was easily 50% of us working on this program – which about that time was about 75 people – about 50% of us were wearing glasses. So we decided it wouldn’t be very smart to design something that wouldn’t fit over glasses.

GameCyte: Can you tell me anything about the weight, battery life and so on of these new glasses?

AF: Can’t tell you the weight, because we don’t have a final weight yet. I can tell you about the battery though. It’s designed to be charged over USB – we’ll ship a USB cable with it – it takes about three hours to charge the battery, and we believe that gaming time will be about 40 hours.

We figured that most gamers will be gaming for about 5 hours a day, 7 days a week – about 35 hours. Give or take on the weekend, you might be gaming a little more… but we figure with 40 hours if someone charges it one time, they’ll be able to game the whole week.

GameCyte: You can drop that in as a marketing blurb: “You go to work; so do we!”

AF: ‘laughs’

GameCyte: And these glasses connect to the PC via an infrared adapter?

AF: There’s a IR emitter which connects to the back of the PC over a standard USB connection, and then that serves as an infrared transmitter which connects to the glasses.

GameCyte: That’s very interesting. And on the glasses, is there going to be an infrared receiver, or an infrared camera?

AF: It’s just an infrared receiver.

GameCyte I was curious, because I don’t know if you’ve seen but there’s a gentleman

AF: I know exactly what you’re talking about – the YouTube video, right?

GameCyte: Yes indeed. Johnny Chung Lee’s headtracking demonstration.

AF: We’ve actually spoken to him, and we don’t have headtracking in this version, but it’s certainly an interesting feature and we’d love to design something for that in the future.

No headtracking. It would be really cool, and I wish we’d thought of it.

GameCyte: So… what is a setup like this going to cost us?

AF: Right now, unfortunately, we’re not talking about price. I apologize.

GameCyte: When can we expect the glasses and monitor to hit the market?

AF: We can’t tell you a date yet for that either, unfortunately.

GameCyte: Would you say, generally speaking, that these are going to be any cheaper than solutions we’ve seen in the past?

AF: What has been your sense of solutions in the past?

GameCyte: Well, I…. I sense that solutions in the past have been expensive enough that 3D technology has not taken off until now, and may still not take off.

AF: It’s interesting you say that, because I don’t think price is actually a limiting factor in the reason why previous solutions didn’t take off. I think the reason why they didn’t is because the quality of the glasses and the entire solution wasn’t good enough for people to really want to adopt it. I know we’re not going to cost $1000. But I think if you look at our technology… when our glasses launch, we will have the only glasses solution on the market that can support those new ViewSonic 120 Hz LCDs. It is a pretty significant engineering technology.

GameCyte: We do have readers who are interested in that technology, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about it. So you say we’ve got the “pure 120 hertz” monitor, and then the stereo images are produced by a combination of alternate-frame sequencing and shutter glasses?

AF: We call it an active shutter glasses solution. Essentially what we do is show a left-eye image for the first frame on the monitor, and allow the left lens on the glasses to be open, and block the right eye. For the next frame on the monitor, it will show a right-eye image, and the glasses will block the left eye.

GameCyte: Are there any plans for a polarization solution instead, or is it definitely going to be active shutter all the way?

AF: Right now we truly believe that our solution – the active shutter glasses — provide the best quality for an end-user. The technology that exists for passive polarized is typically only given to you at half-resolution per eye. If you imagine you’re running a monitor at 1680×1050, each eye will only see 1680×525, effectively, because of how the polarization technique has to be done on the LCD in order to show the right eye and hide the left eye. Certainly over time that can be improved; right now, that’s what it is. If you’ve ever seen half-resolution per eye, you know what happens is that the quality of reading text, and the quality of the image, is not as good as you’d like. Some people just don’t think the quality is that good.

With active shutter glasses, the way we’re pursuing the solution right now with ViewSonic, we can enable full resolution per eye.

GameCyte: And what kind of performance hit should we expect in order to enable that 1680×1050 per eye at 120 hertz?

AF: There will be some performance hit. I don’t think we’ve fully characterized it just yet, so I don’t want to speculate and say what it’s going to be, but I think it’s okay to say that there will be some performance needed to do that because we essentially have to render each frame twice.

It’s not going to be a 50% performance penalty though, it’s not like we’re cutting performance in half – there’s just some performance penalty and we don’t know what it is quite yet. We’re still testing, we’re still optimizing, we’re still trying to make the solution better.

GameCyte: There was an NVIDIA representative at the show who told me that the performance hit might be entirely negated by SLI. Can you tell me about that?

AF: That is true. Our solution will support NVIDIA SLI, so we just use the multiple graphics cards to render more frames. I think when we release the driver, the first stereoscopic driver with our new glasses, it will support NVIDIA SLI.

GameCyte: Let’s talk support. Will this be on Vista and XP? Will it work equally well with DirectX 9 and DirectX 10?

AF: We’re going out with Windows Vista-only to start with. We don’t plan right now on support Windows XP initially, and we’re not sure if we’re going to introduce it later. Right now it’s Vista-only. We found that Vista offered us better architecture and would allow us to deliver better support.

It will work with DirectX 7, 8, 9, 10 applications, all on Vista, it will work top to bottom, it’s got SLI, it supports all our latest generation of graphics processors. We believe Windows Vista has come to maturity and become a really good platform for gaming.

GameCyte: I’m starting to agree with you, but I do wonder – you mentioned earlier that you were worried about cutting out 50% of the market because of those who wear glasses, and it would be a bit of an understatement to say more than 50% of gamers still use XP.

AF: I totally agree with you; we’ll certainly look at it down the line and see what we can do, but right now it’s Windows Vista only.

GameCyte: You’ve said that the new stereoscopic 3D solution will work on GeForce 8 series and above. Is there anything about the 8 series that lends itself to this technology, or is that just where you chose to position the cutoff?

AF: No, there’s actually a very good reason for that. In order to drive at 120 Hz for those new ViewSonic monitors, you need to support dual-link DVI, and all of our GeForce 8 series and higher we guarantee dual-link DVI support on 100% of the graphics processors. Some of our GeForce 7 series did support it, some didn’t. It becomes one of those support things. I can try to explain it, I can try to detect it, but maybe I don’t deliver the experience that someone wants because they thought they had it, but they didn’t.

GameCyte: Have you spoken to James Cameron, and/or Ubisoft, who are working on Avatar?

AF: No, we haven’t talked to them yet. They would certainly be on our short list of game developers with whom to talk.

GameCyte: And on that note, what about console gaming? I don’t know if Avatar is actually going to be on PC, but it will be on Xbox 360. Are there any plans to have this stereo 3D technology enabled in Xbox 360 and/or PS3?

AF: That’s a great question. I haven’t talked to Ubisoft in full detail about how they’re going to do it, but if we take a step back… Right now, if you want to develop a stereoscopic 3D game on the PC, there’s not a lot of work you need to do. Essentially you do your game development like you normally would, you kind of work with us a little bit to make sure you’re doing your rendering properly, and after that, our driver can take over and just make it work. It’s really that easy.

If you look at an Xbox or a PlayStation 3 as a game developer, you essentially would have to take what we’ve done in our driver, and implement it in your game. And if you think about that, that’s not an insignificant piece of code. It’s certainly not impossible, but if you think about it as a game developer, if you’re writing a game and you say you want to dabble in stereoscopic 3D and make it work, you have to make a decision pretty early on, and design it from day one to make sure it works.

The other reason it’s a decision you have to make pretty early on is that most game developers are kind of trained to say, “I’m going to code my game to take advantage of 100% of every single gate, every single function of every single thing I can get out of this platform because I want my game to be super-fast. You’ve already asked, “What is the performance penalty like,” and I’ve already told you there’s going to be some performance penalty…

Also, when you think about the platforms for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, they don’t have a native 3D driver for all these effects yet, so a lot of it is really dependant on the game developer coding that from the start. I’ll be perfectly honest with you right now and say that right now, we don’t have a solution to deploy our glasses onto a PlayStation or Xbox because they’re closed platforms. It would probably require the console maker to open up the platform, install a new driver, update the firmware and do some things to make sure that it works.

GameCyte: Do you think you’d want to initiate that conversation with them?

AF: Myself, I’m not focused on it. We certainly have people who talk to Sony and Xbox and whoever else to try to enable it. Right now, I have to be focused on delivering the best PC platform.

GameCyte: So at NVISION, I saw a bunch of game demos on the ViewSonic monitors, and they looked pretty good. But then I saw a trailer on a large monitor in the exhibit hall, and it looked fantastic — probably because it appeared designed specifically for the stereo effect. Can you tell me a bit about the trailer?

AF: That was actually Medusa. Medusa was a 3D demo developed in-house for our GTX 200 series, which is our latest generation of graphics processors. We developed that for the launch, and that’s all rendered in real time on the graphics processors. So what we did here was, we sat down with the demo team – and I mean literally sat down with the demo team two weeks before NVISION, and we said, “You know what, could you make a couple changes to this to make it optimized” and they did it. I know the guy, and it probably took him four days to make it actually work.

All he did is he basically just changed a couple of camera positions and change a little thing here and there, and what he did by doing that is create the out-of-screen effect you probably saw. Now when you watch that demo, and the guy is turning to stone his face is actually, you know, six inches to a foot out of the screen. When Medusa turns her face to the screen and yells at you, she’s jumping out of the screen, and that’s the type of effect that we want to work with game developers to create… it’s no longer stuff just going into the screen, it’s bullets, balls, characters, whatever it is that’s all coming out of the screen at you.

GameCyte: That leads directly into a two-part question. One, what are you doing to push in that direction… to help developers create these effects specifically for 3D?

AF: This year, in 2008, we’ve already done two developer tracks at GDC and NVISION to help teach developers about designing their games to be compatible with our software solution; we have developer whitepapers which we’ve released to game developers already; and we have our developer technology team. They go out there and meet with game developers on a daily basis: we give them sample code, we review their game, and we give them feedback on how they can improve their game and make it compatible. So that all happens pretty much on a daily basis.

GameCyte: Two, have you spoken with any developers building games from the ground up specifically to generate a stereoscopic 3D experience?

AF: I think we’re having that conversation in real time with game developers; a lot of working with developers is seeding them with all the hardware and making sure they can test it on their own, and we’re in the process of doing a lot of that right now, so I don’t think I have anything on the record I can say, “Yes, this game is going to be specifically designed as a perfectly optimized 3D game.”

GameCyte: Can you tell me even that “there are” games in the works being designed from the ground up to make use of this 3D technology?

AF: Let me answer this way: The game development cycle is 2-3 years typically, sometimes even more, right? A lot of the games we’re intercepting right now to make some changes are games that have already been eighteen months, sixteen months under development. We’re trying to make sure that those games that are about ready to launch are optimized, and then we’re going to go back and focus on the games that are being developed for two years down the road.

GameCyte: What do you think of your competitors? You’ve told me already that these glasses are like nothing else out there, and similarly the ViewSonic display. But can you tell me what you think of IZ3D, for example, and their solution?

AF: I can’t really speak much to IZ3D’s solution; the only thing I can say is I’m excited by IZ3D. If nothing else, they work with our GPUs. Not a bad thing. I like them; I like them for that reason. I think if you look at the solution they have versus ours, IZ3D has some pluses. Some people like passive solutions, they don’t like active solutions, so that’s one reason they might choose them. The downside of that is like I talked about earlier, you’re going to get less resolution, less quality for the game. I know that our solution supports NVIDIA SLI; I don’t think their solution supports SLI.

They can do nothing but help, right? Because right now, they’re talking about stereoscopic gaming; they’re using our GPUs.

********************************

Though all bets are off when it comes to pricing and it seems the industry has not as yet produced that killer app for 3D stereo, it sounds like the combination of NVIDIA and ViewSonic will produce a compelling new possibility for Vista gamers. But in NVIDIA isn’t alone in this market — in their absence, a number of competitors have sprung up. In part two of “Is your gaming future in stereoscopic 3D,” find out how one incumbent, IZ3D, plans to succeed in the face of new competition spurred on by a company whose graphics cards they rely on.

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This post was written by:

Sean Hollister - who has written 588 posts on GameCyte.


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10 Comments For This Post

  1. Charlie Rosenberg Says:

    Just to correct Mr. Fear,:
    iZ3D’s Monitor solution does not cut any resolution. We use two separately controlled LCD panels, so we can provide FULL resolution and Refresh Rate to EACH eye. So, there is no quality loss using our solution. Others that use Interlaced may have the issue, but our solution does not.

    Just wanted to make that correction.

    –Charlie Rosenberg
    iZ3D LLC

  2. yuriythebest Says:

    many inaccuracies from nvidia about IZ3d- not only does it not cut resolution, nvidia also wants to imply that it works ONLY with nvidia cards- they work with all video cards. He must have mixed up iz3d and zalman regarding the resolution- I wonder if it was on purpose.

  3. Sean Hollister Says:

    @Charlie Rosenberg, yuriythebest: I’d planned to let my interview with IZ3D’s Aaron Rapp combat these directly when I publish it later this week — he decisively addresses both concerns — but I thank you for clarifying these statements ahead of time.

  4. Freke1 Says:

    Thx for the interview :-) nice to finally hear from Nvidia!
    Using 2 digital cameras You can make Your own 3D videos.
    Like this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEDzvYS2xoQ
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRlrFj8aKbU

  5. da_giz Says:

    Great interview!
    Alsthough I had to laugh at this statement:

    “I know that our solution supports NVIDIA SLI; I don’t think their (iZ3D) solution supports SLI.”

    Well sure it doesn’t, since nvidia is blocking all outputs but one in SLI…
    Once nvidia opens another output in SLI iz3D will be there running in SLI.
    it works in crossfire already…

  6. nubie Says:

    You seem to have asked a few good questions, which were sidestepped with great skill by Mr. Fear.

    I would like this list of questions asked so I can watch more of his verbal gymnastics :)

    # How does your shutter support the native polarization of LCD technology? Won’t the polarizers cancel each other out? What of the 4 different angles of polarization?
    # The dual LCD and circular polarized projection methods of stereoscopy are very high quality and multi-user (enabling much higher quality and large quantities of users for less money than active glasses), also many already have this equipment, how do you plan to support this installed user base?
    # Some enthusiasts are knowledgeable technically, do you plan to explain in technical terms how your technology works so they can make an informed decision?
    # These same enthusiasts have had support terminated for their (at times expensive) 3D setups, what assurances can you give them to support their brand loyalty to nVidia?
    # Dual displays are the only way to achieve pure stereoscopy, how does nVidia plan on supporting multiple displays?
    # nVidia is touting the SLi a lot, will multi-display support for SLi be available for these multi-display solutions?
    # Do you have any thoughts on iZ3Ds support of any display solution for any OS on any graphics card? Specifically not their monitor?
    # One of your hardware competitors offers multi-GPU acceleration for two outputs, iZ3D can take advantage of this on hardware solutions that are not related to their monitor. What are you doing to be competitive in this area?

  7. Chrisdfw Says:

    I want to know when Nvidia will allow me to use their drivers with my DLP projector at 85hz like I could on every driver release up until 2 years ago.

    Is Nvidia purposefully only making it’s 3d work with it’s own glasses and specific manufacturer displays instead of all 3d solutions like they used to? Why???

    It’s time to switch to ATI and IZ3d drivers if Nvidia keeps up their lack of communication/question dodging and tries to force everyone to Vista, Nvidia glasses, and Monitors from manufacturer that are making deals with them.

  8. turls Says:

    If you look at DLP’s website, it is implied that both Mitsubishi and Samsung use the exact same technology for 3D DLP–there should be nothing proprietary about Mitsubishi vs. Samsung. But then nVidia comes along and does something like this spreading FUD creating doubt in our minds about Samsung DLPs supporting this technology since they only mention Mits DLPs. I understand partnerships, etc. but Rear Projection DLP is hurting right now as far as sales percentage and there is no guarantee this is a product that is going to be around indefinitely. But nVidia has to realize that no matter how much lip service they give LCD 120hz tech, DLP is going to blow it away on quality in this application. So why not just come out and say right now that we are going to support any DLP made in the last 2 1/2 years or so that has the 3D connection on the back? Unless they aren’t doing that and they are coming out with some proprietary solution that either doesn’t use that connection to hook up a box too or one that somehow works with only Mits DLP (which I don’t even know is technically possible or not).

  9. cybereality Says:

    Stereo3d Rules! I’ve got a Zalman Trimon monitor which is available now and fully supported by the Nvidia stereoscopic 3d driver. OMG it makes games look practically real. It works great with Tomb Raider, heh, heh, also Bioshock looks insane in 3d. Unreal Tournement 2004 works perfect in stereo3d. If you play UT2004 then get a 3D-Ready display, its so worth it.

  10. TotallyNOTImmersedByNVIDIA Says:

    So I had completely given up on nVidia regarding immersive frame sequential Stereoscopic 3D for Head Mounted Displays when this came announcement came out. The previous announcement was that they had dropped all support for ACTIVE stereoscopic 3D. LAME. After 6 months of looking for a solution, the only realistic one was using an 8x series GPU and EXPERIMENTAL BETA Stereo3D drivers(that I couldn’t even find on their site) without SLI support. TOTALLY LAME. Andy Fear can’t even state that the new technology will be FRAME SEQUENTIAL, and no apparent date on release for the new drivers to support their new shutter glasses. Plus forcing me to use Vista….Really LAME. Nobody wants to use Vista…are you sleeping with Microsoft now too?

    This makes me want to buy ATI from here on out(and I HATE ATI).

    Come on Andy, stop jerking us around and give us some detailed info so we can MAKE PLANS.

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