Potential Issues & Fixes
When rolling out a new technology, things rarely go smoothly but NVIDIA is well known for their stable drivers on new products and 3D Vision Surround is no exception. The number of issues we had was extremely minor considering the drivers being used were early betas and will not be rolled out to the public. Supposedly, the drivers being posted today on NVIDIA.com do incorporate some fixes.
Nonetheless, I did run into a few problems throughout the limited amount of time the system was in my hands. Below, some of these are listed but please remember to read through completely before passing judgment since several in-game wrinkles came not from NVIDIA’s drivers but from the game engines themselves. Otherwise, some of these are simply the nature of the beast when using early beta drivers.
Field of View: the Bane of Surround Gamers
An incorrect FOV or Field of View is one of the most prevalent issues that pops up when playing a game with a surround setup. What happens is a general stretching of the image as seen in the picture above and to the left whereas the actual image should look like what you see on the right. Most modern games have the necessary FOV set up in their configuration files but others will end up stretching your image so much, the game becomes almost unplayable.
There are fixes for this which include everything from in-game setup options to manually editing a game’s display configuration file with a fixed FOV value. You can find an excellent calculator for correct FOV values at the Widescreen Gaming Forum.
120Hz: Great for Gaming, Horrible for Power Consumption
You may remember that when we looked at the setup process, there was an option to select the resolution and refresh rate. Unfortunately, NVIDIA’s beta drivers held a bug when it came to changing between 120Hz and 60Hz for situations where the GPU was sitting idle. Any changes to the Surround settings resulted in the drivers resetting the 2D refresh rate to 120Hz. Normally, we wouldn’t bat an eyelash at this but it goes hand in hand with extremely high idle power consumption. NVIDIA is aware of this and say it should be fixed relatively soon but here are our results nonetheless:
General Game Incompatibilities
3D Vision Surround and NVIDIA Surround are supported in most modern games but there are still some lingering issues with certain titles. Most are innocuous like Surround failing to engage during Heavy Metal mission in BattleField: Bad Company 2, the inability to select 4xAA in HawX and some disappearing foliage in Just Cause 2 with 3D Vision enabled.
However, we experienced serious menu screen flickering in Empire: Total War (which could be eliminated by selecting a new resolution and then re-selecting the bezel-corrected one) and frequent crashes in HawX DX10.1. We’re hoping many of these will be fixed once the WHQL driver is released in July but unless NVIDIA can work a miracle, it will be impossible to fix everything in one shot.
Bezel Correction Gone Awry
I’ll put this bluntly: NVIDIA’s “paved road” bezel correction image is far from easy to set up correctly. In order to properly set up bezel correction both angled AND straight lines are needed in order to match up images. Instead, NVIDIA uses an angled picture that never, ever properly lines up from one monitor to the next. In my VERY limited time with an Eyefinity setup, I was able to get the correction set without any issues but it took several tries with NVIDIA’s method. The frustration just mounted when the drivers kept on resetting the alignment images to their original positions even though Bezel Correction was enabled. If anything, I’m hoping this is one of the first items on the “to fix” list.
Potential Issues & Fixes
When rolling out a new technology, things rarely go smoothly but NVIDIA is well known for their stable drivers on new products and 3D Vision Surround is no exception. The number of issues we had was extremely minor considering the drivers being used were early betas and will not be rolled out to the public. Supposedly, the drivers being posted today on NVIDIA.com do incorporate some fixes.
Nonetheless, I did run into a few problems throughout the limited amount of time the system was in my hands. Below, some of these are listed but please remember to read through completely before passing judgment since several in-game wrinkles came not from NVIDIA’s drivers but from the game engines themselves. Otherwise, some of these are simply the nature of the beast when using early beta drivers.
Field of View: the Bane of Surround Gamers
An incorrect FOV or Field of View is one of the most prevalent issues that pops up when playing a game with a surround setup. What happens is a general stretching of the image as seen in the picture above and to the left whereas the actual image should look like what you see on the right. Most modern games have the necessary FOV set up in their configuration files but others will end up stretching your image so much, the game becomes almost unplayable.
There are fixes for this which include everything from in-game setup options to manually editing a game’s display configuration file with a fixed FOV value. You can find an excellent calculator for correct FOV values at the Widescreen Gaming Forum.
120Hz: Great for Gaming, Horrible for Power Consumption
You may remember that when we looked at the setup process, there was an option to select the resolution and refresh rate. Unfortunately, NVIDIA’s beta drivers held a bug when it came to changing between 120Hz and 60Hz for situations where the GPU was sitting idle. Any changes to the Surround settings resulted in the drivers resetting the 2D refresh rate to 120Hz. Normally, we wouldn’t bat an eyelash at this but it goes hand in hand with extremely high idle power consumption. NVIDIA is aware of this and say it should be fixed relatively soon but here are our results nonetheless:
General Game Incompatibilities
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3D Vision Surround and NVIDIA Surround are supported in most modern games but there are still some lingering issues with certain titles. Most are innocuous like Surround failing to engage during Heavy Metal mission in BattleField: Bad Company 2, the inability to select 4xAA in HawX and some disappearing foliage in Just Cause 2 with 3D Vision enabled.
However, we experienced serious menu screen flickering in Empire: Total War (which could be eliminated by selecting a new resolution and then re-selecting the bezel-corrected one) and frequent crashes in HawX DX10.1. We’re hoping many of these will be fixed once the WHQL driver is released in July but unless NVIDIA can work a miracle, it will be impossible to fix everything in one shot.
Bezel Correction Gone Awry
I’ll put this bluntly: NVIDIA’s “paved road” bezel correction image is far from easy to set up correctly. In order to properly set up bezel correction both angled AND straight lines are needed in order to match up images. Instead, NVIDIA uses an angled picture that never, ever properly lines up from one monitor to the next. In my VERY limited time with an Eyefinity setup, I was able to get the correction set without any issues but it took several tries with NVIDIA’s method. The frustration just mounted when the drivers kept on resetting the alignment images to their original positions even though Bezel Correction was enabled. If anything, I’m hoping this is one of the first items on the “to fix” list.
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