3D Games setup - best overall vs best midrange vs best cheap

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  wukachuka on 01/02/2013 - 10:23

  Thats a big ask tbh.
  I have a setup with a samsung S27A750 + crossfire ati 7970's.
  Apart from games that have ati hd3d built in (which there isn't that many of yet), i had to buy Tridef 3d software ($50) to make the rest of my games 3d.

  I found with just one video card, getting 120 fps (the monitor is 120hz) made me have to turn a few graphics settings down a bit.

  So i bought another one and crossfired them, now i can have everything on max settings and get minimum 120fps on just about anything in 3d.

  And finally, i have played around 100 games in 3d on this setup and quickly noticed certain types of game are far better in 3d than others.
  Anything third person in an indoor enviroment (think dead space,world of warcraft and other mmo's and stuff like that) works really well in 3d, games with ati hd3d built in work alright in outdoor enviroments, but most games set outdoors with long viewing ranges get alot of ghosting.

  As for dual play one one screen, it halfs the resolution of the screen to do this, so i never really considered it.(and the samsung doesnt do it anyway)

  3d gaming has a long way to go yet imo, but when it is done well, the effect is mindblowing.

• 

  _Bruce_ on 01/02/2013 - 10:34

  +1

  I'm going to address your points backwards so they become hard -> easy.

  5: This is theoretically possible, but it would require:
  A: A TV that can process 2 3D steams at the same time (possible)
  B: Refresh rate 4 times greater than your game ie: 200Hz (possible)
  C: Pixel response times well under 5ms (not sure what TVs do these days)
  D: Active 3D glasses (not the polarised type)
  E: 3D glasses with double the response rate of existing systems (probably not can do this)
  F: Customer demand (or marketting)

  Even with all this, the image will appear a lot more 'flickery', which will be very hard to fix as each eye is only getting the image for at most 1/4 of the time.

  4: This is a great idea, but I don't expect even the next generation of consoles to support it well. This means that you are looking at getting 2 PCs/XBox/Whatever. In theory it could be done on one PC using multiple video outputs, but this has a lot of problems, like performance and many gaming services not allowing multiple log in (like steam). This can be avoided in a more multi user freindly system like Linux, but still will have lots of issues.

  ---

  Got to stop for now, I'll finish this later.

  • 

    _Bruce_ on 01/02/2013 - 11:16

    +1

    So it turns out dual play is a lot less smart than I had expected. Rather than combining two streams it just takes two halves of the display. There are a few problems with this:

    1: Half resolution as mentioned above.

    2: The game must support split screen. This is a rapidly dying feature.

    3: Every time you get content that isn't split, or prompts over both halves of the screen things will break.

    So for the two player feature, perhaps it is best to wait until a TV manufacturer does this properly. I see no technical reason why they can't.

• 

  _Bruce_ on 01/02/2013 - 11:33

  +1

  4: New and revised!

  Here it seems the only option is LG's limited feature. To use this you have to accept:
  - Game must support split screen
  - Many games run less detail/resolution doing this
  - Anything over the whole screen will break
  Very few PC games support this, so you are looking at xbox/ps.

  3: Here the impact on 3D gaming is BIG on performance/quality. This means that xbox/ps in particular struggle, and there isn't a huge list of supported titles. PC has the advantages of more power and you can hack on support to almost anything. As mentioned above though, the system will need to be pretty powerful.

  2: For live to air this is simple and a solved problem. If you want to PVR it then things are a little more complicated. I suspect a lot of the cheaper PVRs will fall down here. If you are setting up a PC system I would recommend something like XBMC, but I don't know how that goes for 3D TV anyway.

  1: For bluray this is a solved problem. Any PC or PS3 will do it (but not xbox). For playing from files you are much more limited, and probably need to go with a PC with XBMC/whatever.

  Summary coming.

• 

  _Bruce_ on 01/02/2013 - 11:41

  +1

  So bits you need to do this:

  1: TV. Only real consideration other than general price/quality is if you want the LG dual player feature, taking into account the limitations. If this isn't good enough you may have to wait for something that is.

  2: Gaming device.

  A: PS3/Xbox. Simple and work, also do basic media. PS3 has the advantages of Play TV and Bluray, so Xbox is really only ahead if you want the arcade or exclusive games.

  B: PC. More fiddly to get running but can produce much better images and make more things 3D. Big picture mode on steam is great. Can also do XBMC for.. everything really.

  C: Next gen console. New Xbox and PS console announcements are expected in the next few months, so you may want to hold off on buying a console just yet. The steam box (piston) is also looking pretty close. If piston come with XBMC integration then it would be perfect.

  3: Media. Both Xbox and PS3 have a lot of annoying limiations here. Really you probably want a PC. You can also set up the PC to do PVR, but that can be a bit fiddly. Special note that you can now run XBMC and Steam off a linux box which is very nice, but the games list is currently short.