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

Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision Technology

The heart and soul of Nvidia’s stereo 3D environment is their wireless active shutter glasses. Active shutter glasses alternately darken their left and right lenses in time with the screen refresh rate (in this case it is 120Hz) by passing voltage through a polarized filter applied on top of the lens glass. This coupled with the screen displaying different perspectives for each eye results in the brain being fooled into thinking it is seeing a true 3D image.

Where the Nvidia solution differs from past stereo 3D products is in the use of the 120Hz refresh rate that results in a flicker-free viewing experience when used with LCDs. The reason past active shutter glasses suffered from flickering is due to the fact that each lens was able to be refreshed at half the nominal 60Hz which resulted in a 30Hz refresh rate for each eye. If you still have a CRT monitor, turn down the refresh rate to somewhere below 60Hz and you will see what I’m talking about; coming from an LCD, you will see a noticeable flicker. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s insistence that you use a 120Hz LCD monitor results in a 60Hz refresh rate for each eye and you should experience much less eye strain in the long run as a result.

At first glance, they may seem like a cutting-edge piece of technology but active shutter glasses have actually been around for decades in various forms and sizes. In the past these glasses have looked awkward at best and would rarely fit over prescription eyewear but Nvidia has changed all of that. Much like the XpanD 3D Cinema Active Glasses, Nvidia’s solution fits right over literally any type of eyewear and it looks reasonably cool to boot.


These shutter glasses make good use of miniaturization to pack a good amount of tech wizardry into a package that is a bit bulkier than a pair of Oakleys. Since Nvidia didn’t want to hook up their users to a cord, the 3D Vision shutter glasses use a battery which powers the lens switching while receiving information wirelessly by way of infrared transmission. In the exploded view above, you can see than the majority of the electronics (IR receiver, battery, etc.) is placed next to the left eye.


The second piece of the 3D Vision puzzle is the IR Emitter that gets hooked up directly to your computer via USB. This allows the drivers to communicate and properly sync the glasses to the action that is happening on the screen.


The glue that holds all of this together is the drivers. We have said a million times in the past that any graphics card is only as good as its drivers allow it to be and the same thing goes for 3D Vision. Much like the way SLI profiles must be written for games that don’t natively support them, Nvidia needed to write profiles for past games through their CUDA driver architecture to ensure that they were properly supporting their stereo 3D standard. Without the necessary driver support, some stereo 3D features would still be available in most games but they wouldn’t be supported to the high standards Nvidia has set for this system.

What we have seen since the release of 3D Vision is the successive release of well-functioning drivers on a nearly monthly basis. Considering the number of games currently supported coupled with the fact that other games (namely World of Warcraft) are actually adding additional stereo 3D effects through patches, we have no doubt that Nvidia is serious about making stereo 3D a reality in PC gaming.