It is sad to see people being so biased against something.
Plus, that review is sloppy, hurried, unfocused, like a job you absolutely didn't want to do.
I think it's telling that in his replies he quietly left out his remark about the 2D performance loss, maybe he was suspecting something nasty was indeed happening to his very old pc, and that was the reason for a big drop in frame rates...
On the other hand, I have been scalded by the many enthusiastic, flying-colors reviews of the edimensional glasses with their (awful) proprietary drivers, where many reviewers' websites were in the business of collecting ad money from edimensional...
So, even in the hypothetical case of this techrepublic review being very positive, I wouldn't have been impressed anyway.
It is difficult to find someone to trust; most are not competent on a niche technology, plus many reviewers seem to be happy to write "their piece" by cutting and pasting material from the official leaflets.
Maybe that is another reason why critics feel free to be equally superficial.
Too many products were touted as the final breakthrough to getting 3D into the mainstream; maybe some people are just tired to get the nth quasi-viable product and to be forced to fight against its bugs and to ignore flaws. So people may be overreacting when they face technicalities and issues with settings and so on.
That said, a reviewer who usually gets the bare minimum playable fps with a pc, then switches to 3D and gets a significant drop, so he says that for a 1000$ monitor he cannot accept this, deserves to be fired immediately for incompetence (to be replaced by me
... )
I remember the edimensional drivers mysteriously getting my fps (in 3D) down the drain, subjectively that was a performance drop of more than 80%, so with enough bad programming going on, you can easily surpass the worst case scenario of 45-50% fps in 3d. I don't really think this is the case here.
The point is, I expect the iz3d drivers to drop the fps by the touted 25-30%, the 50% drop should be a rare worst case, with no further performance loss like in the edimensional days.
Seeing that there is at least one reviewer out there saying that there are issues with the fps with the iz3d drivers, even if he is not making a very good impression of himself, makes me nervous.
Remember I am one of the many guys who
could buy the iz3d monitor by mail, but with no way to test the thing before the expensive parcel gets delivered... Many less motivated people may be discouraged by articles like this one we are discussing, a credible thorough analysis of what really to expect in real life is badly needed.
The proper answer must be that of independent reviews of games showing us verified 3D performance drops with typical pc rigs.
Including suggestions about ideal configs, ex.: getting a pc with SLI, what am I going to get? About the same drop? Not worth the hassle? An even better scenario? Or maybe a nightmare of bugs?