NVIDIA 3D Vision gaming kit review

Posted by Al Warmington on Mon 22 Jun 2009

Take your gaming to the third dimension

3D has been the dream of cinemagoers since the 1950s and although it’s taken over half a century to get here, it’s finally starting to creep into our living rooms, offices and bedrooms. In January’s CES tech megafest, 3D was one of the main themes throughout the show, with almost every screen maker announcing their 3D plans for next year’s screens

However, you don’t need to wait that long for a proper, arguably more impressive form of 3D; one that allows you to truly interact with it in a way that 3D movies simply can’t. Yep, we’re talking about gaming, and it’s no surprise that computer graphics maestro NVIDIA is the one behind it. For £130, the GeForce 3D Vision pack transforms your PC into a proper 3D gaming machine and T3 has had the pleasure of trying it out for ourselves.

Straight out of the box...

The GeForce 3D Vision pack comes with a set of glasses (some of the nicest we’ve seen too), an IR transmitter and a couple of discs with the magical NVIDIA 3D drivers, which turn 3D games into real 3D games. As far as your own hardware goes, you don’t need an awful lot of special tools – a fairly bog standard gaming PC will do the job nicely: we had it running on an Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, an aging NVIDIA 8800 GTX and Windows Vista. No XP support, sadly, but Windows 7 works a treat.

The one extra thing you will need is a compatible screen. 3D compatible screens are reasonably specialist right now, seeing as they have to boast 120Hz technology, and for that they cost a little bit more. We used a 22” Samsung SyncMaster 2233 for the test and apart from the 3D aspect, it’s basically an ordinary screen and you wouldn’t be ashamed to have it on your desk.

The installation process is fairly straightforward. You need to uninstall your old NVIDA drivers, install the new 3D Drivers, then run the setup wizard, which will talk you through configuring the IR transmitter and charging the glasses (USB, basically), and you’re off.

Game on...

Donning our pair of green tipped geek goggles, our first port of call was Left 4 Dead, figuring action packed zombie shooter would be more than enough to give 3D a run for its money. When you first drop in, the 3D effect is visually arresting – the screen instantly becomes less like a flat panel to gawp at, and more like a strange window into room filled with the undead that someone has politely installed on the far side of your monitor. It really does look like you should be able to reach in and have your hand bitten off.

Next we tried some Team Fortress 2 and the experience was much the same, although we do note that NVIDIA 3D Vision seems to prefer the bright cartoony locales of TF2 over the gloomy, perpetual night of L4D. That could be a lot to do with the slight tinting on the lenses on the 3D glasses themselves, which often leaves you wanting to turn up the brightness so you can see what you’re doing.

Already, the NVIDIA 3D games compatibility list is extensive, counting almost anything that’s newish and worth playing at either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. Actually, ‘good’ is something of a misnomer. We fired up Bioshock which fell firmly into the ‘good’ category and found a number of severely off-putting ghosting effects.

However, we were really pleased with how the 3D gaming actually looked – it’s deep and clear and if you’ve ever pondered in misty-eyed wonderment whether 3D is truly the future of entertainment, it’s a real pleasure to see it working – really working – first hand.

Ghostly visions...

But like any cutting edge technology, it’s not without its drawbacks. The main issue is that by giving the game environment depth, it rather messes up the objects at the front of the screen. NVIDIA has a system for inserting a more appropriate laser sight or crosshair (which we couldn’t get to work for the life of us), but actually that was not the main issue – rather, things like ammo readouts, health bars and so on, proved hard to focus on.

Good news is that despite doing something incredibly complicated with the actual rendering, it doesn’t have too much of an impact on frame rates, or at least not enough to give our system any cause to struggle. However, turning things 3D does still come with a still perceptible flicker effect, which becomes much more noticeable when you’re legging it round in a really fast paced game.

We figured that perhaps first person shooters weren’t the genre best suited to the 3D enhancement. Sadly we found another flaw once we fired up our recent favourite, and once video game of the week: Empire: Total War. Despite being classified as ‘excellent’ under the compatibility list, it was anything but – major ghosting effects ruined any chance of using the main campaign map properly and once in an actually battle, things didn’t get any better. In fact it was hard to keep the glasses on, as they seem to be trying to send our eyeballs in eight different directions at once. Some work needed there then, but we trust more updates are incoming.

Is 3D the future?

In the end, NVIDIA 3D Vision augments and enhances your gaming experience, it’s not always for the better. If you’re a serious FPS nut or online player, you probably won’t accept the admittedly limited impact on game performance, the flickering that comes at high speeds, the difficult to focus on HUDS and definitely won’t be happy with the fact that after a couple of hours of intense use, your eyes can feel like they’re about to forcibly exit your skull through your nostrils.

You can ease the brain warping effects by lowering the 3D depth, but that threatens to defy the point of having 3D glasses in the first place. Quality glasses they may be, but couple them with a headset and mic and you’ll feel like you’re back in an early 90s VR machine.

Even so, we don’t want to be too down on NVIDIA’s tech for those reasons alone, and feel very optimistic about what potential it holds for the future of gaming. Many of the issues currently faced are caused by 3D being forced upon games that were never really designed for it.

Now that the system’s out there, game makers will hopefully work with NVIDIA to ensure better support, better alignment of HUD items and so on. It would be really incredible to try out a game designed for 3D from the ground up.

It would also help to see the system running on a much bigger screen, such as the many proper 3D DLP tellies that are emerging, or better yet – a 3D projector.

Links: NVIDIA | Samsung

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- One account per household - don't use a public computer to sign up!
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- Don't try to cheat the system. This site has been proven legitimate, and they will catch you if you try to cheat. If you do everything legitimately, by following this guide, you will get a free gift!

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