Date:
Tuesday , June 29, 2010
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA 3D VISION SURROUND Experience

Many have waited for NVIDIA's 3D VISION SURROUND Technology with bated breath. The wait is over and NVIDIA can now give its GPU owners a 3x1 multi-display gaming experience; and in 3D too! Does NVIDIA's implementation live up to the expectations of those that have been using competitive technology for eight months?

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NV 3D Vision Surround Experience

We have already talked about NVIDIA's near-flawlessly implemented Surround driver set. We have shown you the box and the displays, but what happened when we sat down to play to some games?

I played more than a few games with NV Surround, and NV 3D Vision Surround turned on. Overall, these games "just worked." A couple had some hoops to jump through, and we will talk about that below. DOOM 3 was one the game that would not work with Surround or 3D Vision no matter how hard I tried with my console commands. And really, who gives a damn?

The first game I played was the one that gave me the worst 3D experience; Metro 2033. My notes say, "made me sick." And it did. I stuck it out for about 30 minutes trying to adapt to the 3D, but I could not. I had to get up and leave the machine. And I don't get motion sick from games and I had the 3D depth dialed out as shallow as it would go. Maybe it was my "breaking in" game, I am not sure. What is interesting is that the 3D in Metro looked great as far as 3D goes. No complaints here on IQ. I still don't feel it added a lot to my experience though. The power of the GTX 480 SLI setup is extraordinary with this game. 5760x1080 resolution with "High" settings and the AAA AA setting which seems to do little, but at this resolution it was beautiful. And jeez, so wide you can see everything. A bit of fisheye but I am not too sensitive to it. Turning on 3D in Metro 2033 harpooned the performance. I had to drop back to "Normal" quality settings but still found playability questionable as FPS dropped into the mid-20s.

Just Cause 2 was next. At 5760x1080 I was running High Textures, Medium Shadows, and was forced down to 2XAA by the driver. NVIDIA's water is beautiful in this although I did see some artifacting while using 3D with the water quality set to Very High. The span on the game is awe inspiring, I even called my wife up to look at it and she has no interest in gaming. She even hung out for a minute to watch the sunset dance off of the 64" expanse of pixel real estate. She did point and laugh at me when she entered the office and saw me in the shutter glasses; I am not making that up, think "Nelson." A little coaxing got her to don a pair as well but she took them off quickly. JC2 looks great without 3D. Turning on the 3D in this game did not force us to move down in quality settings. GTX 480 SLI shows its powerful scaling side.

I had never gotten around to playing Stalker:CoP so I was interested in giving it a look. Again, I hit the ground running at 5760x1080 with High Quality looking very good and supporting me with an FPS rate in the mid-40s. Turning on 3D at this quality setting immediately brought me into the teens FPS-wise. Bringing quality down to Medium made the game playable, but I was getting a lot foliage flicker, in both 2D and 3D, but in 3D it was terribly annoying. There were other artifacts as well in 3D. I did not spend a lot of time with this game due to the graphical artifacts.

Aliens vs. Predator followed my stalking. Even at 5760x1080 and tons of eye candy turned on, AvP looked good and felt great. I had to turn Ambient Occlusion off, but with Very High Textures things looked crisp. I was running 50FPS and above in 2D. Turning on 3D pushed me down into the mid-teens, making me move down to Normal Textures and Shadows and I was still dropping into the mid-20s. Everything close to the camera in 3D was not right either. The image was just slightly separated making a double image, just by a hair. When you reloaded the weapon it was evident though. I tried to adjust the 3D depth but it was already dialed in as far as it would allow me. 3D also made the overall image too dark, even with the brightness turned up as far as it would go.

Batman: AA is simply a visual feast at any resolution, but when you move to multi-display resolutions with all the quality dials turned up, it can simply be an exalting gaming experience. We even had Very High PhysX turned on at 5760x1080. Turning on 3D, again killed the performance, forcing us to turn off PhysX so both our GPUs could be utilized for video (something NVIDIA promised me years ago would never ever be the case). Killing PhysX though allowed for solid 3D gameplay with all the eye candy though, giving solid 35-40 framerates. The NVIDIA driver did force 2XAA as well, but the visuals were still stunning. The 3D did make things a bit dark, and again, my office was not dark, but the lights were off in middle of the day.

I love a good round of Left 4 Dead 2 but it not one of those games that is forgiving when it comes to sloppy framerates. Again the driver forced me to 2XAA at 5760x1080 with every possible quality dial turned up. The NVIDIA driver did give me a prompt to turn off Film Grain so I did; probably not a big deal to most of you. The game played great and my field of vision was incredibly wide. No zombies sneaking up on me! Pushing the 3D did not impact the framerate too incredibly but it made it too soft for my liking. Killing the 2XAA pushed the FPS back into the 45 - 50 range.

Modern Warfare 2 turned out to be a real PITA. Widescreenfixer should work fine for this game when it comes to giving it the proper screen ratio. I could not get it to work however. I even got out the reviewers' guide. (Gasp!) I ended up playing it stretched out on the three screens, which obviously looked idiotic, but I got into playing it anyway. For kicks I turned the 3D on, and for some nutty reason, with the screen all out of proportion, the 3D did not bother me at all. Not really sure about that or why Widescreenfixer did not work, as it is supposed to. Maybe I got a new patch through Steam that was it was not liking, but after an hour of trying I gave up.

I am going to lump Halflife 2 and Counterstrike: Source together for obvious reasons. With every visual option spooled up and resolution of 5760x1080 and 2XAA both of these games hauled! Framerates were peeking in the 125 range. Both games were beautiful to see, even if they have gotten a bit old. The width of the screen real estate is tremendously impressive and allows you a field of view that almost allows you to see behind yourself. smile Turning on 3D plunged both of these games' framerates into the low 20s....from 120! The driver prompted me to turn off HDR, so I did. That got me into the mid-20s. Whew. Glad for that.

My final game was Splinter Cell: Conviction and it was the game that was hardest to get to work in NV Surround...besides DOOM3 which never did work for me. SC:C's menu system does not work at all when NV Surround is turned on. But when you turn NV Surround off, and go into the resolution menu, the options for 5760x1080 is there, but it will not let you apply it. So I had to get a bit tricky with it and count the keystrokes so I could move through the menu stealthily. Very Sam Fisher-style I thought to myself. (Just in case you need it: Space Bar, 6 Down Arrow - Enter, 3 DA-Enter, 2 DA-Enter, 30 DA-Enter, 4 DA-Enter. If that does not work for you, you need to be more like Sam.) Once working, I got solid framerates in the 50s with most of the eye candy turned on. Turning on 3D killed the FPS to the low teens. Also, when the game came from a cut scene or training op, when it returned the framerate would be into the single digits. This behavior repeated over and over so I gave up and finally decided to start writing this article. There is a bug there that needs to be fixed, and it seemed to be related to the 3D Vision driver, which prompted me that the game had not been yet qualified by NVIDIA's driver team.

The Bottom Line

NVIDIA has been fighting an uphill battle. AMD left NVIDIA in a stupor with its one-two 5800-Eyfinity punches. NVIDIA had to do a multi-display gaming solution. As reactionary as it may have been to do that, NVIDIA came out on top in a couple of areas. No DisplayPort needed - Win. Can work with last-gen GPUs - Win. Those are two features you have to love about it. SLI required? That is sort of a double edge sword. If you already own a GTX 280 card and have "smaller" displays, the upgrade to NV Surround might work out well for you. If you a new GTX 400 series card, moving to NV Surround might deal out a little financial pain with it while doubling up. That leads to the really big upside to all of this and that is the fact that GTX 480 SLI scales incredibly well and all that pixel pushing power is realized when you start turning on all the eye candy at 5760x1080 resolution. NV Surround and the GTX 480 SLI serve up a virtual visual feast. Let's just get it out here in the open and not act like this is for the bargain bin shopper, because it is not. This is expensive technology to put into your home. That may or may not hold value for you, but make no mistake about it...NV Surround gaming with GTX 480 SLI will give you the best gaming experience you have ever had.

NVIDIA has done a great job with its NV 3D Vision Surround driver implementation. It is a solid product that makes multi-display and 3D gaming easy and almost transparent to the end user. Surely now that NVIDIA is on board, we can hope that AMD and NVIDIA work toward making multi-display gaming an "open" reality for the PC gaming industry. PC gaming needs a champion technology like this to breathe some lifeblood back into it. As for that 3D stuff, well, I say save your $200 on shutter glasses and buy another display. Of course, your mileage may vary.

You can get the BETA driver here. Outlines on requirements can be found here.

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NVIDIA Surround Technology

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