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

Potential issues with 3D and 3D Vision

So what are the disadvantages to 3D Vision? They are relatively minor in this editor’s opinion.  Foremost is the darkness built into 3D Vision by wearing the active shutter glasses although you can compensate a bit with the game’s in-game gamma settings and by making the display brighter.  And likely future iterations of Nvidia’s technology will include some kind of light boosting technology.  The other issues include costs of entry, crosstalk/ghosting and performance issues.

Crosstalk or Ghosting

The ASUS monitor still exhibits cross-talk between the right and left images.  Nvidia’s 3D Vision system cycles between the left and right images at 120 times per second or 60 cycles per each eye.  Using the emitter, the monitors are supposed to switch back and forth between the left and right images, in perfect synch with the 3D Vision active shutter glasses to create the 3D effect.  Unfortunately, this process is not perfect as the pixels do not change instantaneously especially when transitioning from light to dark (and now you know why the 2ms response time is measured from gray to gray).  The resulting artifacts are perceived as a “ghost” image in gaming and also appears in 3D pictures and moves.

Crosstalk makes the image unfocused and leads to eyestrain as the viewer’s brain attempts to resolve the images back into one.  And of course, display technology is always attempting to improve response time and this is also why TN displays are so popular; other types of displays currently have too slow of a response time for displaying stereoscopic 3D.

Health Issues

Most of the health concerns have been really exaggerated by the media as Jon Peddie pointed out.  Actual studies point to issues with 3D viewing but are usually much more minor than reports suggest.  The fact is, if there is a lot of crosstalk and ghosting, you will feel more tired and even get a headache over watching the same program or playing the same game in 2D.  It is important to learn how to adjust your 3D Vision experience to minimize the bad effects and how to tweak the game or movie to your liking

The solution for most gamers is to have more frequent breaks from 3D gaming than with 2D gaming and to switch to 2D if one just can’t tear oneself from the game at all.  Switching back-and-forth between 2D and 3D worked well for this editor’s marathon gaming sessions and it is really a feature of 3D Vision to be able to do it near-instantaneously and in-game on the fly.    Sometimes we even forgot we were wearing the glasses until they started blinking when the emitter was switched off – a safety feature to remind you to take them off when not in use.

Glasses

Another media-exaggerated barrier to widespread 3D adoption is the glasses you have to wear. As Jon Peddie pointed out, people have no issues with wearing sunglasses for many hours.  This is a non-issue as long as the glasses are reasonably stylish and comfortable and Nvidia delivers in this regard.

The real “glasses issue” is with their cost. For the essential 3D  Vision glasses means that you will pay between $80 and $150 depending if you choose wired or wireless.  For a single wireless pair of glasses you may pay $150 and a second pair costs $120.  You do plan to have guests?  Then you will pay out over $250 just for 2 pairs of glasses.

And of course, Nvidia’s active shutter 3D glasses aren’t compatible with other brands of 3D glasses used by HDTV manufacturers – nor they with each other.   This makes sense since the different characteristics of 3D displays need to be accompanied by optimized glasses technology to get the best 3D experience.

Connections

To meet the demands of displaying a full 1080p HD 3D picture, technology has required the development of a newer version of the HDMI specification to version 1.4.  The popular version of HDMI v1.3 doesn’t work with stereoscopic 3D.  Fortunately, the newest desktop displays are not only reaching 27″, they also support 3D Vision as well as HDMI 1.4 giving the end user universal choice for playing S3D games and watching 3D movies and viewing 3D pictures and video. 

Conversion

Although not an issue with PC games, issues with 3D concern the way it is filmed. The only way to get a truly convincing 3D cinema experience is to use specific 3D filming techniques such as in Avatar.  The conversion film or films applying S3D only in post-production really ruin the experience and give a bad name for all 3D to cinema goers. And of course, some games are technically made for S3D but the effort is half-hearted and the end experience suffers.

It is going to take more research to develop standards for games and movies.  Generally, watching a movie on the big screen 3D HDTV, you want pop-out action; for the more intimate experience of PC gaming close to the monitor, more research is needed for determining what objects are best to pop out or not.  Nvidia recommends that developers only use pop-outs in cutscenes.  However, this editor can’t quite agree as the most memorable and intense experiences in gaming pop out of the screen.  Of course, anything overdone gets annoying.
Content

This is a huge problem for widespread adoption of 3D HDTVs.  Clearly cable and sports (and porn) will bridge the content gap until there is more mainstream S3D programming.  Fortunately for the PC gamer, his or her library of older PC games reopens to them and there are many older games released in the last decade that work really well with 3D Vision.  And Nvidia really needs to support OpenGL games with 3D Vision drivers.  Too many great games are OpenGL-based to ignore.

The Display

For the PC gamer, you need the largest and fastest 120Hz LCD that you can afford at 1080p and for the ultimate S3D experience, three matched 120Hz displays.  This is quite an investment into hardware and it also usually entails upgrading the PC to SLI’d video cards.  And for watching 3D movies, you need the biggest HDTV screen that you can afford to get the real cinema experience.

And naturally, there is natural resistance to 3D on the grounds that people have only just recently upgraded to the new HDTVs and aren’t likely to be buying a big screen TV again in a down economy just for 3D.

Stereoscopic 3D has got a long way to go before it hits the sort of mass market acceptance that HDTV has achieved – certainly more than 5 years  – but PC gaming can lead the way once 120Hz displays become popular (at the least, for playing fast paced shooters in 2D).