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

Performance

The GTX 590

As we have noted before, driving 3D Vision takes a much larger performance hit from your PC than playing PC games in regular 2D.  Nvidia mostly recommends downgrading the anti-aliasing to 2X to get closer to to the 50% or less of a performance hit.  Playing with 8xMSAA is mostly wasted performance on S3D as 2X seems to provide the most IQ improvement without the huge performance hit.

Here is some of our testing from early on with highest details and mostly high AA enabled using our GTX 590 and our i7-920 at 3.8GHz.  What we are showing is “worst case” – not turning down AA settings and effects that actually when minimized, make the 3D experience better.  3D Vision really benefits from “tweaking” in every way – visual and performance – so that the user can tailor the S3D experience exactly to his or her tastes.  3D Vision is highly customizable and it works great with a GTX 550 Ti all the way to the GTX 590 and also with multi-GPU configurations.

Metro 2033 is played 1xAA with DOF disabled and you can see the performance hit is just over 50%.  It is a hard game on any PC and playing with 3D Vision looks great but drops to a slideshow at times if you do not compromise details.  Just Cause 2 will run considerably faster with 2xAA in 3D Vision and Resident Evil 5 with 8xAA is a performance waster although it is still fluid in S3D.  Far Cry 2 actually looks better in DX9 for 3D Vision than on the DX10 pathway and you must turn down some settings.

Using the GTX 550 Ti with 3D Vision

Here are the results of our benching with 3D Vision enabled versus 2D with the GTX 550 Ti. There is a significant performance hit because each frame is rendered twice – once for the left eye and once for the right. We will go into much more detail in an upcoming review of 3D Vision.  We tested and played two games – Batman Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5 at our display’s native resolution of 1920×1080 at 120Hz.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was played with maximum settings with a single EVGA-clocked GTX 550 Ti. Motion Blur is left off and AA is set to 2x as in our settings (above).

Here are Batman Arkham Asylum 3D Vision results:

As you can see, it depends on the game as to whether it can be played with 3D Vision and an entry-level gaming card.  Batman takes less of a performance hit in 3D Vision than with some other games (and note that AA is reduced to 2xAA and motion blur is off).  In this case, Batman: Arkham Asylum is very playable in 3D Vision with a GTX 550 Ti and it looks great!  Let’s look at a more demanding game, Resident Evil 5.

Resident Evil 5 is a little more resource-hungry than Batman and we would recommend dropping setting further than what we used.  We did not play the game for very long (as we did with Batman) but will give you our performance results with a single EVGA-clocked GTX 550 Ti at 1920×1050@120Hz. Motion Blur is left off and AA is set to 2x while other settings are completely maxed out.

3D Vision aims for 60 frames per second; 30 per eye. Triple buffering is locked on in the drivers and cannot be disabled.

3D Vision is quite impressive as you now have another dimension of depth to immerse you even more into your game with an entry level gaming card.  Best of all, as you can see it is completely playable on a single GTX 550 Ti.  Batman is described as 3D Vision “ready” and there are no oddities in playing this game whatsoever in the couple of hours this editor spent playing it.  There is no eyestrain, headaches or irritation to report as depth can be set easily and playing at 120Hz reduces flickering to nearly zero.  3D Vision is a way to immerse the entry level gamer into the action much better than 2D.

Using the GTX 560 Ti to play in 3D Vision, we get results in between the GTX 590 and the GTX 550 Ti.  Mostly Unreal Tournament 3.5 engine games (like Batman, Duke Nukem Forever and Alice: Madness Returns) are completely playable in 3D Vision as long as the AA is turned down to 2X and motion blur is mostly left off along with Post Processing.  The S3D performance hit generally is around 40-60%, depending on the game and the settings you turn down or off.

Now that we have an introduction to Nvidia’s 3D Vision and the hardware to play games in S3D and the performance penalties, let’s take a closer look at the 120Hz display required for 3D gaming; in this case, our ASUS VG236.