My 3d vision glasses, EVGA 9800 GTX+ and Samsung 2233rz came in from Tiger Direct on Wednesday. I was surprised at the promptness of the shipments since Amazon gathered the wrong tracking number for the order. Everything arrived at about 7PM. I went to bed at Midnight. Oops.
I got the 9800 in place as a dedicated PhysX card, and my GTX 295 now acts only to render video. I suppose each chip gets an eye, and they attempt to push 120 frames out between them. This is a really exciting development in gaming, despite its flaws.
For one thing, Batman: Arkham Asylum is even more amazing with depth. It’s one of two games designated ‘3D Vison Ready’ on nVidia’s site. I’m not sure what this label means, but it does appear to work much better than the other games I’ve tried. It’s obviously designed with something extra since depth effects are far more convincing in AA than elsewhere.
The flaws are minor, and I’ve been able to get over them somewhat quickly. One is the ghosting. On scenes with high contrast and a near white bright condition, there will be places where you see echoes of the edges of things. While it’s noticeable if you look for it, in a lot of games it just disappears after your eyes get used to it.
There are also issues in some games with skyboxes since they’re often little more than a clever hack to render a large thing without really rendering something that takes up a lot of geometry. Fallout 3 skies are iffy, and the moons of Pandora in Borderlands are ghosty and have some cyan moire artifacts. I don’t look up much so it’s not too big a deal, but in the future I suppose games will have to test for this and find a way around it.
So far Batman is the most enjoyable game, and what I’ve played of Burnout Paradise is very clean as well. One of the things nVidia does to help one out with configuring games to avoid artifacts is a green OSD that explains what features to disable, as well as known issues with a game. Developers use a set of tricks to improve game realism such as deferred lighting and ambient occlusion, and these apparently affect the z-buffer. Some advanced shadow techniques result in odd effects like shadows in front of everything else because they are added to the scene after rendering the 3d portion. Again, this is likely to change in the future.
Now for the fanboy bit: I love my nVidia hardware, and even though ATi has a lot going for it (DX11 shipping now, Evergreen is a seriously well-made chipset) they don’t have anything like PhysX or 3D Vision or CUDA. They have similar things, but the boots are on the ground in nVidia’s camp, and the only catch-up big green has to do is get a DX11-compliant card on the market to dominate. 3D Vision really does tip the scales in the favor of nVidia, and since it won’t work with anything but their card, it also provides lock-in to the brand. If I was ATi, I’d be trying to get a deal to let me in the door on some of these tools.