3D Vision Mega Evaluation – Gimmick or Gaming’s Future?

First impressions

The initial impressions were of games that were already installed on the hard drive.  Batman: Arkham Asylum was a natural to run first as it is 3D Vision Ready – the highest standard for 3D PC games.  We followed the green on screen prompts that are overlaid over every game that Nvidia has tested with 3D Vision.  These prompts told us to turn off Motion Blur and lower AA settings from 8xQ down to 2xAA.  Generally, Motion Blur and Post Processing is turned off for the best 3D Vision experiences and AA is generally lowered to 2x.

Upon loading up a save and playing it in 3D Vision for the first time, we were totally impressed by the stunning 3D effects and nearly flicker-free images with only a hint of ghosting that was quickly minimized by the hot keys and by adjusting the convergence.

Batman is already a dark game, but 3D Vision makes it about 30% darker.  We compensated somewhat with the gamma and our screen’s brightness to make it nearly as light as in 2D and without washing out colors which were perfectly rendered with no color shifting at all.  Color is just as accurate with the 3D Vision glasses as without them.

The cut scenes of Batman appear to reach deep into the screen with only a few situations where objects projected out of the screen.  At first, we played with the depth relatively low, then experimented in later playing sessions with increasing depth until ghosting starts to occur.  Then the hot keys are used by fixing an an element in the near field and adjusted until the object no longer has an edge bleed and the ghosting nearly disappears.

The sense of immersion increased by playing Batman in 3D although it was neither easier nor harder to actually play the game.  The only thing really noticeable other than the pleasing 3D effect, was that the game was being played a little darker that in 2D and the images are slightly dimmer.  This worked well with Batman and after a few hours, we went on to play Resident Evil 5.

Resident Evil 5 is another impressive looking game with 3D Vision and the main characters have some great modeling that take full advantage of S3D.  Immersion is far greater in this game in 3D than in 2D and the intensity of the situations becomes more exciting as everything takes on depth.

First impressions are very good and we ended our first day with 3D Vision very early in the morning.  Our evaluation would eventually lead to playing 6 games from start to finish with 3D Vision and we would revisit about 80 other games.