Duke Nukem Forever – in 3D!

3D Vision and 3D Vision Surround

We received a 3D Vision kit from Nvidia about 3 months ago that we have been continuously evaluating with well over seventy (70!) PC games for a forthcoming mega-review here at ABT. We have also played Duke Nukem Forever from start to finish and replayed much of it in both 1920×1080 in 2D and in 3D, plus in 3-panel Surround (5760×1080) and in 3D Vision Surround.

Consider this Duke Nukem Forever review as our introduction to stereo 3D reviews at AlienBabelTech and to our 70-plus game mega-review of 3D Vision and 3D Vision Surround evaluation which will be published within the next week or so.

3D Vision requires a Nvidia GeForce graphics card, the 3D Vision bundle consisting of the LCD shutter glasses and IR emitter that drives them, and one or more 3D Vision-ready true 120Hz 3D-capable monitors. We are using three ASUS VG236H 23″ 120Hz displays.

For Nvidia’s Surround or 3D Vision Surround, you must use SLI and should use 3 identical displays to match color and characteristics across all of the screens. It will work however, as long as all of the displays are the same native resolution, size and orientation.

3D Vision works by sequentially displaying offset “left” and “right” versions of each frame in a game, and blocking the vision from one eye or the other by darkening the shutter glasses in synchronization with the display. Putting on the glasses and switching on 3D Vision immediately darkens the scene compared to in 2D, and you will definitely need a bright display to compensate. The ASUS displays are excellent in this regard.

The 3D effect appears real as images seem to extened back into the space behind your 2D display, as if it were a window instead of a flat plane. You can even have objects appear to extend out from the monitor’s screen surface as most of the 3D ads show. Unfortunately, this is the best way to “show” someone stereo 3D (S3D) on a 2D plane although if it actually happens often in a game or a movie, it becomes quite disorienting.

The best S3D appears to take place inside a 3-dimensional space “inside” of your display – like inside of a clear-glass aquarium instead of on a flat screen and the illusion of depth is very convincing. Nvidia’s software works by examing the “Z” co-ordinates already programmed into every PC game which means it works with virtually any video game. Some games work much better than others with 3D Vision and some (all OpenGL) games are not supported by Nvidia’s drivers at all.

Please note that there are also performance penalties with Nvidia’s active shutter method of rendering 3D images. Two frames (left and right) must be generated for each frame in 2D, so your game’s framerate will drop by approximately half when 3D Vision is enabled.

There are also limitations to some PC games that will affect the 3D appearance of some objects in the game in relation to others. For example, some effects may be rendered without full 3D information; common are heads-up displays (HUDs) or crosshair sights for targeting. If this happens, items like these will appear at the wrong depth relative to other items in the game and it can be quite disconcerting and/or distracting.

In some of these cases, the game’s graphics effects can be disabled or minimized to work around these issues, and Nvidia’s 3D Vision GeForce driver usually supplies its own crosshair sight in these cases. To help 3D Vision users, Nvidia pre-defines six levels of game compatibility with 3D Vision and it pops up as an green overlay in every game that may be disabled by ctrl+alt+ins.

• 3D Vision Ready
• Excellent
• Good
• Fair
• Poor
• Not Recommended

In addition to these six categories, there is also “not tested” and we will contribute our own findings for a few of these games that Nvidia has not explored – indeed, some older games have superb 3D Vision results. 3D Vision Ready means the game was designed with Nvidia’s 3D Vision and with 3D Vision Surround in mind. There are less than 15 games that are certified as 3D Vision Ready – the best ones that this editor have played so far are Batman Arkham Asylum and Mafia II.  We were very disappointed with Bulletstorm although it is rated excellent as the 3D effects are often confusing; and it should not be that way. How does Duke Nukem Forever compare?

The majority of the 70-plus games that ABT has tested fall into the Excellent and Good categories – one outstanding game being Just Cause 2 which gets an excellent rating from Nvidia; especially for the breathtaking panoramic super-widescreen aerial views over Panau. For some of these games, the player may have to adjust or disable some settings and perhaps use Nvidia’s supplied crosshairs for the best experience. Nvidia even offers suggestions on-screen as your game loads. But very few of these compromises are necessary with Duke Nukem Forever; only the post-processing effects (which are iffy anyway) are disabled for 3D Vision.

For this article, I played Duke Nukem Forever on my Core i7-920/GTX 580 for the first play through in both 2D and 3D at maximum details. For the second play through and screenshot harvest, the GTX 560 Ti was the weapon of choice and for 3D Vision Surround, GTX 560 Ti SLI along with the newly released 275.33 WHQL drivers, which include the 3D profiles for this game and the 3D Vision drivers

Before we get back to the game, let’s check out the hardware we used for our Duke Nukem Forever review.