TechReport: Very poor driver support for ATi 3d

[Rollo]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22350/9

AMD, meanwhile, suffers from a fragmented hardware ecosystem and patchy support for even major titles. Battlefield 3 still has visual bugs with the latest driver release, and Arkham City lacks proper support of any kind right now. More worryingly, we encountered a rendering bug in Portal 2, a game that's been out for over nine months and really ought to work without issues at this point.

I will, however, suggest that you favor 3D Vision 2 until HD3D's patchy game compatibility is, er, less patchy. There's really no sense in going through all the trouble of building a stereo gaming rig only to encounter compatibility problems in every other game.

Man! More terrible driver problems with an ATi gaming solution.

When I saw this I thought to myself,"What if some friend from over on NVNEWS was thinking of buying one of those new 7970s and jumping on the 3d bandwagon?! That would lead to nothing but frustration!"

So in the spirit of helping and spreading valid information as reported by reputable websites, I posted it here.

[K007]

Let me make it easier for everyone else to read Rollo's post..

Originally Posted by Rollo

blah blah blah nvidia uber 1337..blah blah blah ati sux0r..blah blah blah..

[Shamrock]

Originally Posted by tRollo

This message is hidden because Rollo is on your ignore list.

hmm...

[Roadhog]

Really, from that article it looks like both of them suck. The AMD one from it just seems to suck more with game support.

Playability when it did work seems to be the total opposite though.

From a seat-of-the-pants perspective, the Nvidia setup feels less fluid, with intermittent sputtering that compromises the illusion of motion. It's not less responsive mind you; we didn't notice any input delay or anything of the sort. There were, however, occasional skips and rare, subtle oscillations in movement speed and animation.

Here, we see how much time each card spends churning out frames that take longer than 50 ms to render. True to what we saw in the plots above, the Nvidia setup is at a considerable disadvantage. Evidently, the impact of stereo 3D isn't just limited to lower average frame rates (or higher average frame times). Frame-time spikes can be a serious problem. They threaten to damage the illusion of motion and make gameplay choppy.

Interesting article anyways. Maybe when 3D matures more, and we get 120hz IPS panels I might give it a try.

[Ninja Prime]

All you're doing is proving charlie right trollo, NVs got nothing, so they are pulling every dirty viral marketing trick in the book...

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Ninja Prime

All you're doing is proving charlie right trollo, NVs got nothing, so they are pulling every dirty viral marketing trick in the book...

LOL at the thought NVIDIA actually guides my posts. Not the way it works chief, I'm just posting info I see as useful to the community. (and would have done so if Kepler had launched last week for $100 a card and 3X the performance of a 7970)

Is there some reason you don't want people to know how bad ATi's 3d is before they buy it?

What if they don't read, or have never heard of TechReport? They could spend hundreds of dollars setting up an ATi 3d rig and then find out about all the driver problems they have because ATi cheaped out and relied on rinky dink 3rd party vendors for the hardware and driver support rather than manning up and developing it for their customers themselves.

[Q]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

Really, from that article it looks like both of them suck. The AMD one from it just seems to suck more with game support.

Playability when it did work seems to be the total opposite though.





Interesting article anyways. Maybe when 3D matures more, and we get 120hz IPS panels I might give it a try.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I'm seeing 3d fade away, again, before it gets any better. We've all discussed the 3d cycle before. It's too expensive, too niche, and too limiting. I remember back in the Voodoo days when all you needed were those expensive ass goggles that you hooked in your vga between the monitor and the card.

Just like hardware accelerated physics, we're not going to see mainstream adoption until/unless Microsoft writes it into DirectX.

[Johnny C]

Originally Posted by Q

Just like hardware accelerated physics, we're not going to see mainstream adoption until/unless Microsoft writes it into DirectX.

This

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Johnny C

This

(shrugs)

NVIDIA sold over a half a million of the original kits, and the r.2 kits have a lot of nice upgrades.

Maybe as a niche product NVIDIA is happy selling a couple hundred thousand units a year. How many people do you think are sporting 3-6 monitors, 25X16 monitors, and 2-4 high end graphics cards?

With every gaming tech that costs money most people don't want to spend, most people will post "That's a gimmick! Who needs that anyway!?!?" so they don't feel bad about not spending it.

Look at all the 3d Vision monitors out there, and ATi scrambling to follow suit. Must be some market for the stuff. (even without IPS monitors that most people don't own either)

[Lyme]

Originally Posted by Rollo

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22350/9

Personally, I think the negatives still outweigh the positives. On one hand, you've got the high cost of entry, flickering, ghosting, a huge performance hit, and compatibility kinks (on the HD3D side). On the other, you've got... what? A fleeting "wow" factor that's there in some games and absent in others? It's true PC gaming is all about enhancing the experience in subtle ways, but I think stereo 3D requires users to jump through too many hoops for too few enhancements. All things being equal, I would undoubtedly prefer stereo 3D over a lack of it—but things are not equal. Not anywhere close.

Summary, 3d on PCs is crap.

[red777star]

3D on PC with ATI is crap but Nvidia Vision it is great!

[Lyme]

Originally Posted by red777star

3D on PC with ATI is crap but Nvidia Vision it is great!

But Nvidia Vision causes testicular cancer!