The Future of Stereo 3D Part I: Nvidia Geforce 3D Vision

The Good, The Bad and the Wish List cont.

The Bad

As with every new piece of technology, there are always some speed bumps on the road to total, unqualified success. With 3D Vision, one of those speed bumps is and probably always will be the price of admission. Not only do you need to spend a good $250 for the active shutter glasses but you have to pair the whole thing up to a 120Hz monitor that will put you back another $500. When many people take a step back and see the sub-$300 asking price of most other 22” monitors, justifying $500 isn’t an easy thing to do. Make no mistake about it though; with high-end optics and wireless operation, active shutter glasses don’t come cheap. That also means if you accidentally destroy your shiny glasses, you will be forged to fork over a good chunk of change for a replacement.

The fact that 3D Vision is only available for Nvidia cards will also alienate a large portion of their potential consumer base, especially with ATI’s cards pulling down some impressive performance as of late. This is an unfortunate trade off but it is a necessary one since there is no way I can see ATI giving Nvidia early access to their drivers.

Nvidia claims that their solution is the “brightest” out there since it lets through the most light without completely washing out the contrast in games. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid the reality that shutter glasses do tend to block out a portion of the visible light spectrum. This is noticeable in games like Far Cry 2 that already has a washed-out, decidedly brown feeling to it which the polarization on the glasses just ends up enhancing until it looks like someone smeared mud over the screen. Pop on a pair of polarized sunglasses and look at your monitor; that’s the light output you will need to become accustomed to with these glasses on.

Another nagging issue that popped up from time to time was stereo 3D text rendering in certain games. In games with a lot of on-screen text which is rendered on a 3D plane, you will either see the text in double or misrendered. This becomes distracting to the extreme when you are trying to get a bead on your enemy.

Convergence. Get to know it because it's the the term used to denote the amount an image projects beyond the plane of the screen when viewed in stereo3D. In my opinion, it is an essential tweak which you may want quick access to when you become a more advanced user. Unfortunately, Nvidia's 3D Vision has this option buried in the Advanced Menu due to the fact that there are preset profiles for convergence built into the drivers for each game. While I find 3D Vision performs admirably without adjusting this setting too much I think it is imperative that Nvidia makes it a point to tell users a bit more about it and its importance to bring their solution to the next level. On that same note, it should be noted that adjusting convergence can have a seriously negative impact on your gameplay experience as well and has been known to cause headaches and serious eye strain if improperly adjusted. Even though we have this in the "Bad" column, for the majority of users convergence should be left at default.

Then there is the performance hit. On the 9800 GTX+ we used, performance dropped like a stone due to the fact that 3D Vision forces the card to render two images at once. This results is an approximate 50% hit in framerates that will leave you scrambling around trying to find settings which will reduce the load on the graphics card. Just remember that the performance will scale in a linear fashion so a slightly higher end GPU like the GTX 260 216 would allow for higher IQ settings at a perfectly playable framerate. Usually, it will be the AA settings that will suffer and this can have a huge impact on overall image quality.


The Wish List

After staring down the barrel of a nearly $700 price tag, there are still things I find myself wanting from this kit. No, I am not looking for jumping leprechauns and Star Trek holosuite-like effects. Heck, I don’t even need stereo 3D porn (or do I?). However, it is time to put myself in the beta tester’s boots and start talking about things Nvidia should add to future revisions of this kit.


First and foremost, placing a single LED at the very top rim of the glasses to tell you the battery’s charge strikes me as a half-assed solution. This thing has three states: green means there is more than 2 hours of charge left, red means there is less than 2 hours and no color means you are screwed. Overall it works quite well…until you play a game for 4 hours after forgetting to charge the glasses. In that case, when you turn the glasses on you will be greeted with a green light (indicating more than 2 hours of charge remains) but you have no way of knowing if green means 3 hours or 6 hours. Plus, most gamers won’t be bothered to take off the glasses to check if the LED has gone from green to red. To alleviate this battery crap-shoot, I would love to see Nvidia implement an on-screen display tied to a hotkey that can tell you exactly how much gaming time you have left with the current charge.

There is also no good way to distinguish one TV from the next when it comes to compatibility with 3D Vision. Granted, there aren’t many of them on the market yet but from what I can see things aren’t starting off too well. This is mostly because LCD manufacturers seem to all have a different idea of what constitutes a “3D Ready” product as most lack the VESA 3-pin connector needed for 3D Vision. Heck, even though Nvidia has a “3D Vision Certified” logo, to this date Mitsubishi isn’t even using it on their LaserVue DLP minisite. Is this a question that Nvidia is charging too much for the right to carry their logo? If so, we will find out soon since we have an interview with Samsung coming up which will shed some light on some aspects of certification. To help consumers make the right choices, Nvidia needs to aggressively push manufacturers to make use of the certification logos or the 3D Ready logo that Samsung is using. If this doesn't happen, choosing a 3D Ready panel will become even more of a crap shoot and potential customers will become needlessly frustrated.

While it won’t be too big of a deal right now, a user-replaceable battery would go a long way to selling me on Nvidia’s product. As it stands, the competing solution from iZ3D (which we will take a look at in Part II) doesn’t need to worry about batteries due to its use of passive glasses. Unfortunately no battery technology is perfect and even though Nvidia’s battery life claims are amazing, I would rather have the option to replace my battery if it dies prematurely.

Speaking of batteries, it might be slightly too much to ask for but a wall charger for the glasses would be a welcome accessory. Charging them directly from the computer isn’t necessarily a horrible option but there will be plenty fo cases when all of your USB ports are being used and you are left with nowhere to plug in the glasses.