Nvidia 3d vision 2 test: Nvidia 3D Vision 2 Wireless Glasses (Extra Pair) review: Nvidia 3D Vision 2 Wireless Glasses (Extra Pair)

Nvidia 3D Vision 2 Wireless Glasses (Extra Pair) review: Nvidia 3D Vision 2 Wireless Glasses (Extra Pair)

A few years back, Nvidia released its 3D Vision Kit active 3D solution. At the time, it was the only real choice for 3D PC gaming, but its crushingly dark images and abundant crosstalk were problems. The Nvidia 3D Vision 2, along with Lightboost technology, attempts to address those issues.

Design and features
The Nvidia 3D Vision 2 glasses look less like actual glasses and more like goggles. This can be attributed to the thick brim and endpiece that surround the lenses, as well as the more angular edges compared with the first-gen 3D Vision glasses. In fact, the second-gen glasses sport an almost complete redesign from the first-generation specs. Gone is the glossy, piano-black finish, replaced with a matte, dark gray look that thankfully uses a much more comfortable, softer-feeling plastic.

Also, the handles don’t squeeze my head as tightly, but still feel suitably snug when wearing the glasses. The nose pad seems to be slightly wider, with the rubber padding covering more surface area. The first-gen glasses sported a thinner, circular-shaped temple that became really uncomfortable when wearing headphones. On the second-gen glasses, the temple is wider and flatter, with a rubber cushion at the ends, making for a much more comfortable experience.

The power button is now located on on the left endpiece, right in the middle of the gray Nvidia logo. The endpiece is also about twice as long as it was before and the Micro-USB port is still located on the underside of the endpiece.

On my model, the right side of the bar wouldn’t stay connected and I had to constantly reconnect it. Very annoying, but a minor quibble.

The 3D Vision 2 glasses are just as heavy as the first-gen model, but thanks to some smart design choices, they feel more comfortable when worn and like any good pair of glasses, you can easily forget they’re on your face after a while.

Games performance

I used the Asus VG278H to test the 3D Vision 2 glasses’ 3D performance and the Samsung SyncMaster S23A750D as a comparison, using Sasmung’s active-3D solution. I set each monitor to 200 candelas per square meter (cd/m2) and used Dragon Age 2 as the chief test game. Initially, the 3D depth on each monitor was adjusted to 50 percent.

Right away I noticed how much brighter images on the Asus’ screen were compared with the Samsung, a fact that can be attributed to Nvidia’s Lightboost technology. The technology is compatible with both first- and second-gen glasses, but requires a monitor that features Lightboost.

Lightboost controls both the backlight of the display and shutter behavior on the glasses. With non-Lightboost monitors, shutter behavior is less efficient, exemplified by times when each shutter would be closed at the same time during operation. Also, the content being shown on the monitor displays each frame, sequentially, with no pause in between. These characteristics of non-Lightboost tech cause images to both appear dark as well as display noticeable crosstalk.

With Lightboost, the shutters on each lens alternate more precisely and both are never closed at the same time. Also, in between each frame of the content being shown, the monitor backlight shuts off. These two changes, in conjunction with each other, allows for brighter images with less crosstalk.

However, the proof is in the pudding. With Dragon Age 2, crosstalk was difficult to notice most of the time, but it did rear its head when viewing dark images on light backgrounds. Comparatively, the Samsung displayed much more crosstalk, with consistent and apparent ghosting on the edges of character models. Also, when looking at 3D images on the Samsung, my eyes got fatigued much more quickly. Through the Nvidia lenses there was also a much more dramatic and convincing 3D parallax effect when I viewed the display from different angles.

3D works when it can successfully trick your brain into believing two images are actually one and is usually most successful with polygonal images; however, 2D images that aren’t in the actual game environment, like cursors, are usually less convincing. Not surprisingly, viewing the cursor as one image was problematic, causing my eyes to strain and adjust to the new image.

After lowering both monitor’s 3D depth down to 25 percent, hardly any ghosting was noticeable on the Nvidia, but I continued seeing double on the Samsung.

I also tested Crysis 2 and Black Ops, and both delivered similar results.

Movies

Using the Nvidia solution, the «Three Musketeers» 3D Blu-ray looks bright and sharp and with the 3D depth level set at one, showed virtually no crosstalk. With the depth increased to four, fast moving images are a lot blurrier and I felt more strain on my eyes.

Running the same movie, images on the Samsung were darker, blurrier, and more stressful (on my eyes) to watch.

Conclusion

In order to take advantage of Lightboost, you’ll need a compatible monitor. The Asus VG278H comes with the 3D glasses, as well as a built-in emitter, and is available for about $650. There’s a more expensive Acer model as well as a BenQ that’s actually really hard to find in the states from major retailers.

If you already have the first-gen Vision Kit, these glasses will only make a difference in comfort and their ability to block out ambient light — advantages that may not be worth the extra $85.

3D Vision 2 with LightBoost is the best 3D solution for 3D games. Now we just need to see more monitors made that take advantage of the technology.

Test System And Benchmarks — Stereo Shoot-Out: Nvidia’s New 3D Vision 2 Vs. AMD’s HD3D

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Our time to put this story together was relatively limited, so we chose to test the graphics cards that make the most sense. We already know that enabling stereoscopic 3D causes a performance hit. So, in general, interested parties should come to the table with the highest-end graphics hardware they can afford. AMD’s HD3D driver is not yet able to benefit from two Radeon cards in CrossFire, so the best-case scenario is a single Radeon HD 6970.

On the 3D Vision side, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 570 is comparable to the Radeon HD 6970. In addition, since 3D Vision does support multiple cards in SLI, we’re also including a high-end GeForce GTX 580 SLI configuration.

Finally, we want to show you what to expect from low- to mid-range cards. Our original plan was to use a Radeon HD 5770, but both of the models we have on-hand refused to work with the TriDef driver, reporting that they cannot detect the 3D monitor over DisplayPort. So, we had to go with a Radeon HD 6790 to represent AMD’s entry-level 3D card. With Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460 768 MB no longer available, we chose the similarly-priced GeForce GTX 550 Ti to represent the bottom of Nvidia’s line-up.

TriDef’s Virtual 3D Mode

We tested each Radeon card twice: once in the default TriDef 3D mode, and once in TriDef’s Virtual 3D mode. Virtual 3D mode often provides a performance benefit by rendering a single viewpoint and using the depth buffer to extrapolate the image for the second eye. As an added benefit, this mode is usually impervious to shadow and lighting artifacts suffered by the default TriDef 3D mode and 3D Vision.

Virtual 3D mode often comes under fire because it’s misunderstood. To be clear, Virtual 3D mode is not a poorly simulated 2D-to-3D conversion like the ones you might find on 3D televisions and in DVD playback software. Instead, Virtual 3D mode uses data in the scene‘s depth buffer to create a separate image for each eye. This is a valid model, and Crysis 2 uses the same technique to create stereoscopic 3D for Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology.

This mode is not perfect, though. The depth buffer can’t account for transparent textures, so objects behind chain-link fences appear flat. Virtual 3D mode often struggles to identify the user interface, and as a result it’s often distorted by the objects behind it. The edges of objects are sometimes blurred, as the software extrapolates pixels from limited data. It also doesn’t appear to work with multi-sample anti-aliasing. Despite those issues, Virtual 3D mode often serves up better image quality than the default TriDef 3D mode, so it’s a valid option to test. If a game we’re testing game has significant problems, we’ll point that out.

 Here are the particulars of our test system:

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Test Hardware
Processor	Intel Core i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge)Overclocked to 4 GHz, 6 MB L3 Cache, power-saving settings enabled, Turbo Boost disabled
Motherboard	MSI P67A-GD65, Intel P67 Chipset
Memory	OCZ DDR3-2000, 2 x 2 GB, at 1338 MT/s, CL 9-9-9-20-1T
Hard Drive	Western Digital Caviar Black 750 GB, 7200 RPM, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3Gb/sSamsung 470 Series SSD 256 GB, SATA 3Gb/s
Graphics Cards	2 x Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 in SLI (for 3D Vision)Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 (for 3D Vision)Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti (for 3D Vision)AMD Radeon HD 6970 (for AMD HD3D)AMD Radeon HD 6790 (for AMD HD3D)
Displays	Asus VG278, 27″ 1080p 3D Vision monitorSamsung S23A750D, 23″ 1080p monitor
Power Supply	Seasonic X760 SS-760KM: ATX12V v2. 3, EPS12V, 80 PLUS Gold
CPU Cooler	Cooler Master Hyper TX 2
System Software And Drivers
Operating System	Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64
DirectX	DirectX 11
Graphics Driver	GeForce: 285.38 Beta, AMD Catalyst 11.9
Stereoscopic Driver	TriDef 3D 4.6
Games
StarCraft II	version 1.3.6.19269
World of Warcraft	version 4.2.0.2506
Bulletstorm	version 1.0.7147.0
Lost Planet 2	version 1.0.1.129
Left 4 Dead 2	version 2.0.8.5
Metro 2033	version 1. 0.0.1
DiRT 3	version 0.1.0.11

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Test System And Benchmarks

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GeForce video card summary test (page 2)

Test results: performance comparison

Battlefield 4 (Tashgar)

• Version 1.0.0.104788.
• DirectX 11.
• Full screen anti-aliasing (FXAA) — high.
• Full screen anti-aliasing (MSAA) — disabled.
• Texture quality — ultra high.
• Texture filtering — ultra high.
• Lighting quality — ultra high.
• The quality of the effects is ultra high.
• Post-processing quality — ultra high.
• Mesh quality — ultra high.
• The quality of the relief is ultra high.
• Relief details — ultra high.
• Global Shading — HBAO.

Nominal

3D Vision off

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3D Vision included

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Acceleration

3D Vision off

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3D Vision included

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Minimum and average FPS

recommendations

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (Angola)

• Version 1.2.1.
• DirectX 10.
• Full screen anti-aliasing (AA) 4.
• Anisotropic filtering (AF) 0.
• Texture quality is very high.
• The quality of objects is very high.
• Shadow quality is very high.
• The quality of physics is very high.
• Shader quality is very high.
• The quality of volumetric lighting is very high.
• The quality of the special effects is very high.
• Post-processing quality is very high.
• Particle quality is very high.
• Water quality is very high.
• Blur quality — very high.

Nominal

3D Vision off

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3D Vision included

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Acceleration

3D Vision off

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3D Vision included

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Minimum and average FPS

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new generation of 3D technologies / Smart things

More than two and a half years have passed since 3D Vision technology was first introduced as a mass and inexpensive solution for obtaining 3D images on a PC screen, and a review was published on the pages of 3DNews «NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision stereo glasses — long live the volume!». By the way, if we talk about the generations of NVIDIA’s stereo 3D technology, the version of 3D Vision presented today with an index of 2, by and large, should be called the third. If you remember, for the very first 3D Vision glasses, monitor manufacturers were able to present 120-Hz models with a maximum screen resolution of only 1680×1050 pixels, mostly with a diagonal of no more than 22 inches.

Only much later, LCD displays appeared, the matrices of which had a full Full HD resolution of 1920×1080 (1920×1200) and a diagonal of 23 or 24 inches. It was at this second stage in the development of 3D Vision technology that the second, more ergonomic and economical generation of 3D glasses was introduced.

Today, no one can surprise anyone with a 24-inch monitor, and the prices for such models, even those with stereo 3D support, have dropped significantly. The NVIDIA 3D Vision Kits have also been significantly reduced in price, in addition, it has become possible to purchase additional 3D Vision glasses without a USB emitter. This summer, NVIDIA introduced wired 3D Vision glasses, distinguished primarily by their low price. And the ability to connect computers to modern 3D TVs and 3D projectors using NVIDIA 3DTV Play technology has been available for almost a year now. Also not to mention the stunning panoramic technology NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround.

The prevalence of stereoscopic content in recent years has also increased by orders of magnitude, and the variety of games, videos, applications and, most importantly, their quality are now able to satisfy even the most sophisticated demand. Suffice it to say that if at the beginning of this journey many popular games were actually converted from a two-dimensional format to a pseudo-volumetric format, then recently most development teams in one way or another try to initially develop 3D game engines, taking into account the requirements of stereoscopic perception by the viewer. By the way, it was NVIDIA who did a gigantic job of adapting hundreds of modern games to work optimally in conjunction with 3D Vision technology, and today there are more than 550 such games.

And would you like to know what awesome stereo 3D toys are waiting for us in the coming months!

It cannot be said that NVIDIA’s competitors have been doing nothing all this time. You’ve certainly heard of the Intel InTru 3D and AMD HD3D stereoscopic technologies, but take a look at the slide below: to be fair, no other company in the PC market has done as much to popularize stereo 3D gaming as NVIDIA did, score The number of different computer systems supporting 3D Vision (laptops, desktops, nettops, etc. ) has long been in the hundreds.

---

Strictly speaking, all this protracted introduction is necessary in order to emphasize one very important fact. The reality is that for some of us, a stereoscopic computer and related stereo content in the form of games, videos, movies, photos, and the like has long since become commonplace. We play, shoot and edit videos, enjoy movies, but … we are all human, and sooner or later we want a serious upgrade. And if more powerful video cards with support for more and more new technologies and effects come out with enviable regularity, stereo 3D fans on the street are less likely to have a holiday.

But it happens.

So, get acquainted: 3D Vision 2 . The key differences from the previous generation of technology are as follows:

• Completely new design of active-shutter 3D glasses with improved performance;
• New generation of 27″ monitors with built-in emitter;
• NVIDIA 3D LightBoost Technology.

First of all, about the new glasses: the size of the eyepieces in the 3D Vision 2 version has grown significantly, by about 20%. The developers took this move taking into account several considerations at once.

First of all, due to the increase in the size of the «glasses» the field of view of the player increases, which, in relation to the new 27-inch diagonal monitors, is not without meaning. For those who play computer games on 3D TVs with a diagonal of 40 inches or more, the increase in viewing angle will also be a welcome change.

In addition, the enlargement of the 3D glasses will make it much more convenient to use them with regular prescription glasses.

Finally, the more closed design of the new goggles further eliminates side flare. In other words, it will now be more comfortable to play even in a room with bright light.

The new glasses are made of modern composite materials, so that the increase in size did not affect their weight at all, the glasses are still quite light and comfortable for long-term use. However, now the control has changed somewhat: the button for turning on the glasses in the new version has been moved from the upper edge of the left arm to its side plane. The button itself has also become much larger.

One of the highlights is that 1st and 2nd generation 3D Vision glasses and devices are fully interchangeable.

But that’s not all. A really serious change in the technical performance of the glasses was an additional optimization of the algorithm for switching between the LCD shutters of the right and left eyes. The optimization is performed in such a way that the open time of each curtain is minimized and synchronized as accurately as possible with the signal coming from the emitter, as a result of which it was possible to further reduce the side effect of «flicker».

Thanks to the help of employees of the Russian division of NVIDIA, for which we are very grateful, I was one of the first to try out the new 3D Vision 2 3D glasses in action. I confirm from personal experience: putting on new 3D glasses over regular diopters is now much more convenient than in the case of more compact, but at the same time less «deep» glasses of the previous generation.

As for «flickering»: I always test it with fluorescent lights in the room, they constantly «beat» with a 120 hertz 3D monitor and are most suitable for assessing the intensity of this parasitic side effect. So, the comparison of the new 3D Vision 2 glasses with the glasses of the previous generation was not in favor of the latter. At the same time, I emphasize that I have no complaints about the «old» 3D Vision glasses, I have been using them for a long time and I know perfectly well how to reduce the «flicker» to zero. But the new 3D-glasses showed the highest class in the most difficult conditions, with intense illumination of the room with fluorescent lamps.

No matter how I tried, replacing the previous generation of glasses with a new one and back, to catch the difference in the light transmission of LCD screens, I could not find one. The fact is that the picture on the monitor screen seemed unusually bright to me, and the first thing, of course, was the thought that it was the new glasses.

No, it’s not them, but the new patented NVIDIA 3D LightBoost technology, the support of which will now be mandatory for all new monitors certified for 3D Vision 2. some increase in screen brightness. This is done not only and not so much to compensate for the level of brightness lost when light passes through the glasses: 3D LightBoost technology perfectly suppresses the parasitic effect of phantom flicker .

A few words about monitors with support for NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 technology. At the time of the announcement, two such variants were presented. The first is the 27-inch ASUS VG278H LED-backlit monitor with a resolution of 1920×1080, support for 2D and 3D modes. The second option is laptops of the Toshiba Qosmio X770/X775 and Satellite P770/775 family, equipped with a 17.3-inch 1920×1080 screen, also supporting 2D and 3D modes. Of course, in both cases, the new 3D Vision 2 glasses are included in the package.

Both versions feature a built-in 3D Vision emitter. Yes, that’s right, the same «pyramid» with a USB interface, which was previously supplied separately in the kit, will now be integrated not only into laptops, but also into some models of 3D monitors.

Modern monitors such as the ASUS VG278H can handle both stereoscopic Full HD video streaming from a PC (Dual Link DVI interface) and collaboration with, for example, a Sony Playstation 3 game console (HDMI 1.4a interface).

It is interesting to note that the built-in 3D Vision 2 emitter is located on the top of this monitor.

Now it only remains for us to tell you about the timing of the appearance of new products in retail and approximate prices. In the US, deliveries of new 3D Vision 2 kits and separate glasses will start at the end of October. In Russian retail, as I was told in the Moscow representative office of NVIDIA, these new products will appear in the new year, 2012.

Nevertheless, those who urgently want to join the new generation of technology should not lose hope, because it will be possible to purchase new 27-inch 3D monitors (and maybe laptops) even earlier. Thus, the aforementioned 27-inch LED 3D monitor ASUS VG278H, complete with 3D Vision 2 glasses, will appear in world retail in November, so its appearance in Russian stores may well take place before the Christmas holidays. By the way, it is quite possible that it is in November that several more manufacturers will announce the release of new models with support for 3D LightBoost technology. In particular, we can expect announcements of such models as Acer HN274HB and BenQ XL2420T/XL2420TX.

Now about prices. For North America, the price of the NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 kit (glasses plus USB emitter) and the separate 3D glasses will be exactly the same as it has been for the current generation of devices so far, i.e. $149 and $99 respectively. Of course, it’s too early to talk about prices in Russian retail, but NVIDIA confirmed to me that our pricing will remain approximately the same, that is, a new set and new glasses will be offered at the same price at which current 3D Vision models are currently sold.