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

3D Vision Surround

Nvidia and AMD work to differentiate PC gaming from console gaming.  Besides better image quality and performance, PC gaming in Surround or Eyefinity across multiple displays give a wider field of view and a increased awareness of the overall situation.  Eyefinity was first with this technology so Nvidia upped the ante by making it possible to not only span 3 displays, but to also do it in S3D.

With 3D Vision Surround, the special 3D effects envelope the player on the sides as well as from the front screen and they provide for a near-ultimate gaming experience. The issues include the rarity of games – especially older games – that support super-widescreen resolution as well as the incredible demand on the PC, that of rendering the equivalent of six 1080p screens!

There are limitations to 3D Vision Surround.  Unlike with Eyefinity that can support 6 (even mismatched) monitors off of a single card, Nvidia requires 3 perfectly matched displays to be run from SLI’d video cards and those displays must each be 1080p (or lower) native resolution and they must all be in Landscape – Portrait is not supported because both the displays and the glasses are polarized.  You are also limited to TN panels for now.

Setting up 3D Vision Surround is just as straight-forward as setting up 3D Vision or Surround.  You start the wizard and follow it step by step until you are done.  The issues are purely one of performance.  Using a single GTX 590 or even GTX 580 SLI, the game will choke if they are demanding at the 5760×1080 resolution you need to run – and in 3D.

It is difficult to recommend 3D Vision Surround as readily as we can 3D Vision.  There are far too few games that work well at 5760×1080 that also won’t choke when 3D Vision is enabled.  The exceptions – like Just Cause 2, Oblivion and Duke Nukem Forever might well be worth it if one has the cash and one can always use the displays for productivity and in playing in 5760×1080 regular 2D Surround.