NVIDIA DRIVER NEWS, Your Thoughts?

[sean_skroht]

I have to wholeheartedly agree with both RAGEdemon and chilledsanity regarding Vista.

For the reasons they have mentioned, I will totally bypass this operating system, and look at what M$ has to offer with Windows 7. Vista is the current Windows ME, and when you see how the majority of the general public have refused to take up this Vista BLOATWARE, you do begin to realize that the GREAT PUBLIC VOICE cannot be wrong!! They have spoken, and the resounding shout has been that Vista is a big FAIL from a general computing point of view.

I work for probably the largest bank in Australia, and all of our systems that we use and depend on in the branch are all built on XP, and probably will before the next 5 years. There has been absolutely no consideration to move beyond this OS. I have also built several systms for people over the last year and in ALL cases they have specifically requested XP. The question begs to be asked: What is it about Vista that has turned so many people off? Well, this question has already been answered in the previous posts, so no need to flog a dead horse.

The point of the matter is, user support for XP is as strong as ever despite Vista having had public exposure for more than a year. It should say alot to Micro$oft and to software developers, and Im absolutely bemused as to why nVidia have taken the Vista only road with these new 3D drivers. Possibly this may change in the near future. Let's hope so.

[cybereality]

Wow, can't believe I just read all that! Anyway, heres my 2 cents:

I just built a new rig with Vista 32-bit on a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo and a 8800 GTS 512MB. I've literally been waiting over a year to upgrade my machine after I found out S3D didn't work w/ the newer drivers. Finally they release them (amazingly right before my birthday, woot!) so I could finally upgrade with some confidence. So far I like Vista, its not that slow, SP1 must have fixed a lot of stuff. Also, I was used to gaming on an 6800 GT so that alone is a huge jump, Vista or no Vista. Getting above 60fps in all the games I've tried (except Crysis naturally, but that still runs alright).

I just got a chance to try the 3d driver tonight. When I use it, it says: "Only Anaglyph Mode Allowed on this Display". It doesn't say supported, it says "allowed". I thought that was a bit offensive, but whatever. It was nice to see the 3d driver displaying info on the screen (a green hud like the tv volume). The HUD also worked when you adjusted the stereo separation, it displayed on the bottom of the screen. A nice touch. Mind you, I am gaming on a 32" Samsung LCD (just the 2D kind, 60Hz). I wanted to at least test the drivers before I throw down any money on the Zalman. I was able to play Crysis in S3D (anaglyph mode) and it worked pretty good. The colors looked like crap (I can't really take anaglyph anymore), but the 3d was solid. The 2D HUD elements were correctly rendered (not doubled) and all the post-processing appeared to work fine. For example, when zoomed in with the iron-sights, the background would get blurry but stay in 3D. I am also running in custom very high mode, all shader effects maxed out. The performance took a hit, but it was still playable. The display showed an FPS of 15-20 fps but I'm sure it was running higher. It still looked relatively smooth. I think it was halfing the number since there were 2 frames rendered. I'm not sure, but I usually get around 45fps avg. so 15 in S3D seems too low. It also didn't look like 15fps, that would have been a chop-fest. 3dmark06 worked great with the new drivers, everything had a lot of depth (text was fine).

Other than that, the stereo test app worked in 3d. Other games I tried didn't work. Unreal 3 didn't work at all. Neither did Quake Wars. I don't mean it was messed up. I mean it won't even enable the driver. It runs 2D mode only. Even nvidia demos like Adriane/Nalu/Luna didn't work at all. Its *only* the games that are listed as supported by Zalman (http://www.zalman.co.kr/ENG/product/Pro ... sp?idx=219). Click FAQ and then "support games". That kinda blows. I'm not sure what other games work, but it seemed to limited by the ones nvidia is actively supporting. Its not like before where everything would sorta work but need tweaking. I need some more time with it, but it looks like thats whats going on. All-in-all, I think enough recent titles are supported, but its definately a step back. There is also no option for other displays, it must auto-detect the Zalman and come up with other menus or something.

I can understand why people are pissed, but there are other solutions. The iz3D and their driver is one of them, theres the nvidia driver for vista/8800/zalman, vuzix has a stereo driver for the vr920 (still need to test this on vista), TriDef and the Samsungs, TDVision is launching an HMD this year, its not just nvidia anymore. And if you want to hold onto your old technology nvidia's not stopping you from using their old driver. It sucks, but these companies can't be expected to support every single platform or peripheral they ever supported. CRTs are not really sold anymore, the market moved to LCD. Vista is whats new, companies have to be expected to support it. XP was supposed to be EOL by now, and nvidia probably acted on that assumption when developing drivers. We really shouldn't be that pissed at them when they are moving forward with S3D in some respect.

And to be honest, I don't mind ponying up the cash for a Zalman, if thats the way its got to be. People keep saying they are willing to pay for 3d drivers, maybe thats what it costs?

[wuhlei]

the vr920 runs great on vista

[chilledsanity]

We really shouldn't be that pissed at them when they are moving forward with S3D in some respect.

Well what would your attitude be if you bought a Zalman monitor tomorrow, then Nvidia didn't update their drivers for a year and a half, then announced they would only be supporting a new solution on a new OS?

I have to say that if Nvidia is really going the route of ONLY running on games that it officially supports, that's a big step backwards. The old Nvidia drivers would try to run on anything you threw at it. Iz3d's do too, although with less compatibility for older ones.

[yuriythebest]

We really shouldn't be that pissed at them when they are moving forward with S3D in some respect.

Well what would your attitude be if you bought a Zalman monitor tomorrow, then Nvidia didn't update their drivers for a year and a half, then announced they would only be supporting a new solution on a new OS?

I have to say that if Nvidia is really going the route of ONLY running on games that it officially supports, that's a big step backwards. The old Nvidia drivers would try to run on anything you threw at it. Iz3d's do too, although with less compatibility for older ones.

yup. imagine you bought an iz3d monitor and then iz3d would say "we no longer support this relic of a technology- buy our newer monitor". What would be your response? of course iz3d would never say that, but nvidia does this all the time over and over again. so why forgive nvidia so easily? Just because it's a large brand? that's no reason at all. People learn t not to swallow everything microsoft makes, now it's nvidia's turn.

[Likay]

yup. imagine you bought an iz3d monitor and then iz3d would say "we no longer support this relic of a technology- buy our newer monitor". What would be your response? of course iz3d would never say that, but nvidia does this all the time over and over again. so why forgive nvidia so easily? Just because it's a large brand? that's no reason at all. People learn t not to swallow everything microsoft makes, now it's nvidia's turn.

Don't forget microsoft... they're the worst... regarding vista i'll change to it when i have the feeling it gains me more than xp. Since support will drop on xp that is inevitable...
A big honor to the iz3d company. Better support exists not in this world.

cheers

[yuriythebest]

yup. imagine you bought an iz3d monitor and then iz3d would say "we no longer support this relic of a technology- buy our newer monitor". What would be your response? of course iz3d would never say that, but nvidia does this all the time over and over again. so why forgive nvidia so easily? Just because it's a large brand? that's no reason at all. People learn t not to swallow everything microsoft makes, now it's nvidia's turn.

Don't forget microsoft... they're the worst... regarding vista i'll change to it when i have the feeling it gains me more than xp. Since support will drop on xp that is inevitable...
A big honor to the iz3d company. Better support exists not in this world.

cheers

yes actually I mentioned microsoft there

[cybereality]

We really shouldn't be that pissed at them when they are moving forward with S3D in some respect.

Well what would your attitude be if you bought a Zalman monitor tomorrow, then Nvidia didn't update their drivers for a year and a half, then announced they would only be supporting a new solution on a new OS?

I have to say that if Nvidia is really going the route of ONLY running on games that it officially supports, that's a big step backwards. The old Nvidia drivers would try to run on anything you threw at it. Iz3d's do too, although with less compatibility for older ones.

Yeah, I'd be more pissed off, but this is nothing new. I remember a few years back how much of a hassle it was just to get shutter-glasses working. I bought the Another Eye 2000 (the ones that are $10 now) with a brand new $400 ATI card. Drivers didn't work, so I sold the card and bought a $500 nvidia card. Then I found the glasses were broken. Ended up returning them, and buying a pair of ELSA revelators. And I was very happy with the nvidia 3d drivers at the time, but I had to go through a whole lot to even get that working. Stereo3d gaming has never been easy, cheap, reliable, or plug-and-play. Even when the nvidia 3d drivers were "supported" there were still all kinds of issues, like having matching video/stereo drivers, incompatibility with games, visual glitches, etc. In fact, I think the industry will be better off *not* relying on nvidia's half-baked excuse for a driver. That might be a bit harsh. The driver was good a few years back. Like when QuakeIII was new, that was pretty fun.

That said, I am pretty upset at what nvidia has done. When first posting I was mainly looking at it from the angle of CRTs+Shutter-glasses. I didn't think it through about projectors and HMDs, etc. I can understand not supporting CRTs but its a real shame that they choose to give their greatest fans the cold-shoulder. They've all but destroyed my plans of getting a DLP projector for big-screen 3d gaming. I've got a VR920, which has its own driver with limited support, so I'm not out in the cold here. I'm just saying that there needs to be some progress without nvidia. The iz3D drivers seem to be maturing nicely. Maybe an open-source OpenGL driver (could this be integrated into the next version of OpenGL maybe?). How about some pressure on Microsoft to support stereo in DirectX10? What about ATI, why are they sleeping on this? Its been years of bitching and moaning to nvidia, clearly they don't care. That's where I'm coming from. I'm not saying this doesn't suck. I'm saying I doubt the situation is going to change by us sitting here complaining.

Right now the only real hope we have is Samsung. They are the only company in this space with any sort of clout to pressure the likes of Nvidia or Ati into supporting S3D. In fact, I suspect this is exactly why nvidia has made the new driver Zalman only. I suspect they may be in negotiation with Samsung to possibily support these new tvs (they showed Need For Speed in 3D on the Samsungs at CES, we know somethings going on). They would probably like other companies like Vuzix and iz3D to pay for the support, rather than develop their own drivers. If this business model works (who knows how much Zalman paid?) then that means Nvidia will be generating profits from their S3D division which means more progress on the driver, and possibly more support. I think you guys are missing that Zalman is just the first company to license the technology. In 6 months or a year, the situation may be very different.

There may be other 3d lcd hdtvs in the works that we don't know about but nvidia does. I'd much rather that these companies spend their time/money bringing some more mainstream 3d solutions to market. The fact that nvidia choose to license their driver means someone there thought there was money to be made. If a company like Zalman (who is known for making fans and heatsinks) can afford to jump into this market, then surely others can too. But if we are just all using 3d solutions from 10 years ago with outdated hardware/drivers/OS, then there is no money to be made from that demographic. Just think about it, from a business standpoint it makes sense. Thats why I want to get a Zalman. If people like us just boycott the Zalman out of knee-jerk reaction, then it just hurts the industry in the long run. We *are* the niche market that is supposed to be willing to pay for this kind of stuff. And if we don't buy it, then it will never hit the mainstream.

And, for what its worth, I'd rather have a crippled driver just for Vista and the Zalman than nothing at all.

[Freke1]

Over 500.000 ppl have bought a 3D ready Samsung TV. They just need a driver. Look how small the 24" LCD to the far left looks in this picture I found:

[cybereality]

Over 500.000 ppl have bought a 3D ready Samsung TV. They just need a driver. Look how small the 24" LCD to the far left looks in this picture I found:

Thats a sick setup. I thought I was boss with a 32" Samsung for gaming but thats just insane.

Now imagine that Nvidia is currently working with Samsung to make this big-screen 3dhdtv a reality. Isn't that worth tossing out the old crt?

[yuriythebest]

Over 500.000 ppl have bought a 3D ready Samsung TV. They just need a driver. Look how small the 24" LCD to the far left looks in this picture I found:

Thats a sick setup. I thought I was boss with a 32" Samsung for gaming but thats just insane.

Now imagine that Nvidia is currently working with Samsung to make this big-screen 3dhdtv a reality. Isn't that worth tossing out the old crt?

biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig................................

but without drivers/content also very pointless. at least 3d wise. Still want one though

[crim3]

What a beast! XD They could give curvature to it to surround you a bit. But I'm sure the designers didn't expect that use.

[cybereality]

What a beast! XD They could give curvature to it to surround you a bit. But I'm sure the designers didn't expect that use.

For that you might want this alienware monitor:



http://ces.cnet.com/1606-13855_1-6826215.html

And since its CRT based it would work with shutter-glasses and the old nvidia driver. But I don't think you could play Crysis with those drivers.

[crim3]

oooOOOOOH!! o_O! XDDD supercool!

[LukePC1]

I see it critically. Did you think of the resolution or fov?

fov: You culd only see a fragment of the screen, when you're too close to it.
resolution: the dots per inch (dpi) are roughly 1920dots/40inch ~= 50dpi
it is about the same as a 1024/20", if not less.

So it has much less dpi than good monitors! It's a TV afterall and you can't sit... 2feet infront of it and 3 won't be nice either...

but if you don't sit at the tabele, it should be usable

[Tril]

I just wanted to say that the HDTV on Freke1's post is not a Samsung HDTV. It's a Sharp LC52WD1E LCD HDTV. It shows well the size difference between a 24" monitor and a 52" HDTV.

[LukePC1]

Well I have to agree on that. And exactly that makes it nearly impossible to use it on a desk as a monitor.
And it's even BIG compared to a normal TV. These have a diagonal distance of 1,30 meters...
which is less than I expected before calculating

[cybereality]

Ok, I just spent some time with the new nvidia driver (175.16 WHQL w/ 174.76 Stereo Driver). I also installed the iz3D driver (1.08 beta) for comparison. All tests were done in anaglyph mode since I own neither the Zalman nor the iz3D. I'm using a 32" Samsung LCD @ 1368x768 / 60Hz w/ an 8800GTS 512MB on Windows Vista 32-bit. This is not scientific, just my initial impression.

Crysis:

-NV: Crysis was working good in 3d. In the driver notes it suggested disabling motion-blur and setting shader/post-process to medium. I just left everything at very high. It was still in 3d, but it did look a bit muted depth-wise (which I assume is due to the blurring effects muddying the image maybe). HUD and other 2D elements were rendered correctly at screen depth and did not shift when adjusting the 3d settings. Performance took a noticeable hit but was still playable.

-IZ: For some reason the iz3D driver would not work with Crysis. When stereo is enabled all I see is black and red on the screen (like looking through a red filter). Hotkeys show the settings, but they do nothing. Then it started glitching out with these white blocks moving across the screen like tetris. I have a feeling this is due to the fact that I patched Crysis for the VR920 and I think that is interfering.

Call of Duty 4 (SP Demo):

-NV: Worked in 3d. HUD was correctly rendered. The gun looked *really* three-dimensional. However after playing for a minute or two I noticed that the background was 2D. It had separation, but both views were the same angle. The gun however was clearly in 3d, and looked like I could practically touch it. After much tweaking I realized this was a trick. Only the gun was 3D, everything else was 2D. Not only that, but there was some glitch where performance would drop to like 5 FPS, for no reason. Otherwise it would run fullspeed 60FPS, then it would start choking for no reason. Shuttering even, and go back and forth between good and bad performance. In 2D I get a silky smooth 100 FPS, its not an issue of the hardware.

IZ: COD4 worked great with the iz3D driver. The background was actually in stereo 3d, unlike whatever hack was going on with the nv driver. The gun didn't look as good, but it was ok since the whole scene was fully 3d. Performance was fine, no hiccups or stuttering. 2D HUD elements rendered correctly for the most part (some were slightly off, like when sniping, but it was minor). Highly playable.

Unreal Tournament 3:

NV: Didn't work AT ALL. Its actually disabled in the driver. If you go to the nvidia stereo panel it lists UT3 in the games list, but its compatibility is "N/A". Only displays in standard 2D mode.

IZ: UT3 worked great with the iz3D drivers. Everything was fully 3D. HUD elements were correctly rendered at screen distance. When shooting rockets you could clearly see the line of smoke in 3d. Flying vehicles were very fun, good sense of depth overall. Post-processing effects seemed fine.

Half-Life 2:

NV: It worked in 3D, but displayed the same exact issues with the HUD as on the old drivers. It has not been updated at all. Still provided a pretty fun experience, and after some tweaking, the HUD was not a big issue. Performance took a hit, but it was still very smooth on an 8800GTS at 1360x768. Getting about 50-60fps average which was fine. After about 15 minutes there started getting glitches on the HUD, pieces of the HUD would become rendered in the middle of the screen and get stuck there. I'm somewhat disappointed they did not attempt to fix these issues on a game this popular.

IZ: For some reason this didn't work for me. Getting the same red screen thing that was happening on Crysis. I think its due to having a VR920 stereo driver patch (which I did on Crysis too) so I can't really fault IZ here. Will revisit this at a later point.

3DMark06:

NV: Worked great in full stereo 3d. HUD elements rendered correctly. Some very nice depth and some out of screen effects (with the spaceships). Minor performance hit. There were some glitches with the shadowing (double shadows, random polygons, etc.) but otherwise the image quality was good.

IZ: Worked very well in 3d. Good depth, looked almost identical to the nvidia driver. The preset was perfect, the nvidia one needed some tweaking. Also, there were no glitches or visual anomalies with the shadowing. Performance about the same.

GRID (demo):

This is notable because the demo came out last week and there is no way either company could have tested their drivers with it.

NV: Stereo 3D worked great. Might be the best anaglyph gaming I've ever seen. Its a typical racing game like need for speed. The sense of depth was great. After a little tweaking it really blew me away how good even anaglyph could look on a 32" HDTV. 2D HUD elements were rendered fine. HDR lighting effects and smoke from the car and everything looked good. There were no glitches or anything like that I noticed. Performance seemed fine (barely any noticeable hit).

IZ: The demo starts, the first part is indeed in 3d (the intro) but as soon as I get to the title screen it crashes. Tried a few times, no luck. -1 on IZ here.

Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars:

After installing new 3d drivers this game no longer works. It gives a DLL error when I try to start it. Not sure what happened. But I installed 3 different stereo drivers (nvidia, iz3d and vr920) so I probably mucked something up myself. Will come back to this one.

Nvidia demos:

None of the nvidia demos (adrianne, nalu, luna, etc.) would work in stereo with either driver. Neither one of them would enable at all. This is strange because these same demos used to work with the old nvidia driver on XP. So not only has nvidia removed stereo hardware support, but they have also removed software support as well (for their own demos!?!?). I'm not sure if this is an isolated case or not, but it seems strange to disable support like this.

- - -

Overall its a mixed bag. On the whole the iz3D driver seemed better (or at least more usable), but there were some compatibility issues as noted above. The nvidia driver showed some improvements. They added an on-screen HUD, but it will only display the separation, *NOT* the convergence. I found this odd, but its at least a step in the right direction. The iz3D driver however displayed all the values so you could easily write them down or remember. The 3 stereo presets were also very helpful. The nvidia driver is supposed to be able to save and load profiles, but it has never worked right for me. The iz3d driver was most definitely easier to use and to tweak. The iz3d also displayed a far superior stereo image in COD4 than the nvidia driver. And iz3D worked for UT3 very nicely while the nvidia driver disabled support for it.

On the other hand, the most impressive 3d I saw tonight was on GRID using the nvidia driver. With the iz3d driver enabled it would crash that game. The nvidia list of supported titles was also much larger, however it appears that they still have the same compatibility issues on older titles (borked HUD etc.). There are about 20-30 games that have been recently updated (including Crysis, COD4, Bioshock, Burning Crusade, etc.) so I assume thats all there is in terms of new support.

Its still hard to make a decision between the iz3D and the Zalman just based on my initial tests of the drivers under Vista 32-bit. It would be nice if everything just worked together (ie I could run any driver on either monitor). As it stands, neither driver is a clear winner, and both suffer from compatibility issues. On the brighter side, this at least proves that Vista is gaining support in terms of stereo 3d. Speaking of Vista, the performance I'm getting is pretty good. I mean, if I'm running COD4 in Vista *and* in 3d while still getting above 60fps, it can't be all that slow.

// cybereality

[Neil]

With the iZ3D driver, Crysis will run with an AMD card. There are compatibility problems with NVIDIA cards with this title for some reason.

Regards,
Neil

[flexy]

Over 500.000 ppl have bought a 3D ready Samsung TV. They just need a driver. Look how small the 24" LCD to the far left looks in this picture I found:

Thats a sick setup. I thought I was boss with a 32" Samsung for gaming but thats just insane.

Now imagine that Nvidia is currently working with Samsung to make this big-screen 3dhdtv a reality. Isn't that worth tossing out the old crt?

biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig................................

but without drivers/content also very pointless. at least 3d wise. Still want one though

my 22" widescreen, which is pretty good size on my desk for gaming,...is TOTALLY dwarved when i put the 50" in front of my desk.
Also, pictures dont do it justice AT ALL.....its almost impossible to capture the size/impression such a 50" makes in a picture, not to mention how it looks playing a game on it...even "only" 2D...its just mind-blowing...and for now i only tried WoW...lolmao

Edit:yes..in that picture of that other person..doesnt even come close what the real "feeling" is ahving such a monster in front.

[yuriythebest]

my 22" widescreen, which is pretty good size on my desk for gaming,...is TOTALLY dwarved when i put the 50" in front of my desk.
Also, pictures dont do it justice AT ALL.....its almost impossible to capture the size/impression such a 50" makes in a picture, not to mention how it looks playing a game on it...even "only" 2D...its just mind-blowing...and for now i only tried WoW...lolmao

then please capture it in a stereoscopic picture

[cybereality]

With the iZ3D driver, Crysis will run with an AMD card. There are compatibility problems with NVIDIA cards with this title for some reason.

Regards,
Neil

Yeah, I was just on the iz3d site and I noticed 'ATI ONLY' for Crysis, too bad.

Well I guess the ATI guys deserve something since they usually get the shaft.

[LukePC1]

Call of Duty 4 (SP Demo):

-NV: Worked in 3d. HUD was correctly rendered. The gun looked *really* three-dimensional. However after playing for a minute or two I noticed that the background was 2D. It had separation, but both views were the same angle. The gun however was clearly in 3d, and looked like I could practically touch it. After much tweaking I realized this was a trick. Only the gun was 3D, everything else was 2D. Not only that, but there was some glitch where performance would drop to like 5 FPS, for no reason. Otherwise it would run fullspeed 60FPS, then it would start choking for no reason. Shuttering even, and go back and forth between good and bad performance. In 2D I get a silky smooth 100 FPS, its not an issue of the hardware.

On 'old' NV driver you had to push convergence quite high. There is a layer of PostProcessing, which has to be pushed of the screen. Behind that lies the buty of S-3D

Please tell me, if this should work on the newer NV drivers...

[wuhlei]

3d support for crisis is supported by the vr920 I havent got to test it my self tho.

[Tril]

3d support for crisis is supported by the vr920 I havent got to test it my self tho.

It work but there are some issues. The 3D is correct but there are some artifacts like textures that disappears when you look in some directions. I had every settings on low when I tested it.

[cybereality]

Call of Duty 4 (SP Demo):

-NV: Worked in 3d. HUD was correctly rendered. The gun looked *really* three-dimensional. However after playing for a minute or two I noticed that the background was 2D. It had separation, but both views were the same angle. The gun however was clearly in 3d, and looked like I could practically touch it. After much tweaking I realized this was a trick. Only the gun was 3D, everything else was 2D. Not only that, but there was some glitch where performance would drop to like 5 FPS, for no reason. Otherwise it would run fullspeed 60FPS, then it would start choking for no reason. Shuttering even, and go back and forth between good and bad performance. In 2D I get a silky smooth 100 FPS, its not an issue of the hardware.

On 'old' NV driver you had to push convergence quite high. There is a layer of PostProcessing, which has to be pushed of the screen. Behind that lies the buty of S-3D

Please tell me, if this should work on the newer NV drivers...

I just re-tested COD4 just to verify my findings:

The nvidia driver is doing something apparently (aside from slowing the game to a crawl) but its not accurate stereo 3d. I tried adjusting every sort of value that can be modified and there was not an optimal setup. I read the driver notes, it lists compatibility as 1 (which is supposed to be excellent, lol). It also says to disable "glow" and "depth of field". I did that. I also disabled AA just to be safe. When first starting the game the 3d defaults are at apparently good settings. The gun looks almost holographic. But the background has next to no depth at all. Imagine the HUD (life, bullets, etc.) like they were stickers on the screen. Right in back of that you see the gun going inside the screen about 3 inches or so. Then about and inch or two behind that is a flat 2D image of the rest of the game. It looks like you are playing an arcade game with a plastic gun on a 2d screen. After lots of adjusting (basically pushing seperation up to 100% and pulling the convergence back) I managed to get some very minor 3d effects in the background. It still looked flat, but it wasn't completely flat. Like when I switched between 2d/3d the 3d mode did indeed had something going on, but it wasn't much. Also, with the seperation set so high the HUD was doubled up and unreadable. After about 5-10 minutes I was getting a headache. Not to mention the performance issues and bugs. Some parts were moving at 5fps or less and made the game unplayable. I'm only using the demo so maybe the full game is fixed, but thats not really a good sign.

The iz3D driver, on the other hand, was fully 3d and performance was great. There is no question that the iz3D handles COD4 properly (even with glow/dof turned on). When moving in a squad I can clearly see the depth between characters, or against the background. Looking up at a tall building looked realistic. The smoke from rockets was very dimensional, you could walk under it and around it, very 3d. HUD was rendered correctly, not doubled up. When looking at the edge of a doorway (such that my left eye was in one room and my right in another) I could close one eye, and clearly see a difference between the angles on the views. With one eye I could see a sliver of the inner wall, but the other eye could just see the door frame. With the nvidia driver this level of depth was not possible. In COD4 the iz3D driver was leaps and bounds better than the nvidia one. When using nvidia I was constantly tweaking the settings, wondering if it was 3d or not (or if the eyes were reversed or something). With iz3D, the image was obviously in 3d as soon as the game started.

So technically COD4 is "supported" by the nvidia 3d drivers, but I wouldn't exactly call it "working".

[flexy]

Hello, this might be off-topic now. But i want to give my input here too.

I run Vista X64 since the very first betas, and now i have a quad core rig at 3.6Ghz, 4gb Ram and a nice 8800GTS.

I was posting a lot on other, related forums how i hate Vista...but all my "hate" is actually related to the OS, working with the OS and not so much games.

Game-Performance is actually very good. Vista "as an OS" is just sluggish....i have another machine with XP which is a fraction as fast as this Vista machine, and sometimes i want to cry since i see that simple things on that OLD machine are way faster than working on the Vista machine.

BUT....i still do support Vista, and i appreciate NV bringing out the latest Vista 3D drivers, at least they WORK.

But it is a very halfa$$ story, since those new drivers only support anaglyph..which is a total joke since i just got a Samsung "3D" Plasma.

So i miss support for, and i am unable to play any game which is NOT supported by the "Tridef" 3D drivers...and also the NV driver seems to crash with ANY app using OpenGL. I have a kickass flight-sim "x-plane" which uses OpenGL..just as an example.

G.

[cybereality]

Game-Performance is actually very good. Vista "as an OS" is just sluggish....i have another machine with XP which is a fraction as fast as this Vista machine, and sometimes i want to cry since i see that simple things on that OLD machine are way faster than working on the Vista machine.

I hear what you are saying. I've got a similar setup, 3.6GHz C2D w/ Vista and a P4 2.4GHz machine with XP. Although the new machine is clearly faster with games and intensive applications, at other times its simply on par (when it should be like twice as fast). Although, I actually like Vista a whole a lot more just due to the integrated search bar. On my XP machine I have so many programs installed that my start bar exceeds the limitations of my monitor (1680x1050) so its literally impossible to click on the last column of programs. It also hangs the computer for up to 10-20 seconds just to display the start menu. On Vista I have no such problems, start menu comes up instantly.

I've been wanting to install Vista for quite some time but held off due to the issue with the stereo drivers. Honestly, XP does what it needs too, but its just boring to me now that I know all the ins and outs. Vista is much more fun just discovering new icons to click on and hidden functionality. I like the way you can see real-time previews of minimized windows (even running video), the 3d alt-tab thingy, directx 10, theres lots of stuff to like. One thing that simply drives me crazy on XP is when you drag windows around while another program is computing (aka not responding) it will just draw on the buffer without refreshing so you get all kinds of weird visual issues. On Vista everything looks nice and smooth, even when the programs are frozen. A minor issue, I know, but its little things like that which remind you that Vista is actually a new operating system.

Another thing (again slightly off-topic) is that Vista isn't as popular as it may seem. I just took a poll the other night for Steam and I looked at the latest results. Evidently only 15% of gamers playing on Steam are using Vista, the other 85% are on XP. Granted, many Steam gamers are playing like CS 1.6 and the old DoD, so they couldn't even run Vista if they wanted to. Even so, I expected it to be at least like 20% by now.

BTW: I'm typing this from my XP machine, I don't want you guys to think I'm some huge Vista nut. I use both. But at the same time I don't intend to run XP for the rest of my life, especially not at the whim of nvidia. (see its on topic again)

[flexy]

the main reason to go vista was actually that Vista has DX10, and since i have 4GB of memory i also have Vista 64 to be able to use the 4GB.
I PROBABLY would go back to XP if there would be DX10 for XP....but then all new development, drivers happens on Vista....and i never liked the idea to be behind 5 years with current tech

Btw...ironically, i disabled all "Vista Like" features and pretty much run Vista with a look and feel of XP, i also dont like the search bar But there are other, more internal "enhancements" which make it better than XP, not only the most obvious ones which people see.

One gripe is..that still a lot of programs are not compatible, or come with less functionality than their older counterparts under XP....and especially with 64bit it often gives me headaches. Well..typical example 3D drivers...but this can be a lot, like certain applications and utilities.

[yuriythebest]

the main reason to go vista was actually that Vista has DX10, and since i have 4GB of memory i also have Vista 64 to be able to use the 4GB.
I PROBABLY would go back to XP if there would be DX10 for XP....but then all new development, drivers happens on Vista....and i never liked the idea to be behind 5 years with current tech

DX10 - show me 1 game that requires this. Crysis doesn't btw you can enable the highest setting in XP by hacking it a lil.

4GB ram- I use Win XP 64bit that handles them perfectly

all new development, drivers happens on Vista - can you clarify?

and i never liked the idea to be behind 5 years with current tech- if a Flintstones style car was invented tomorrow would you drive one?

[cybereality]

DX10 - show me 1 game that requires this. Crysis doesn't btw you can enable the highest setting in XP by hacking it a lil.

Keep in mind DirectX 9 came out in 2002. We are just recently seeing the full depth of dx9, *6 years later*. Dx10 just came out last year. Of course there isn't any game that requires it. No developer would shoot themselves in the foot like that. It would be like releasing a PC game only on Mac or something. But come one year, two years from now we will see things with dx10 that are not possible to hack in dx9. When that happens I want to be there and I'd like my computer to support it. If that means having the run Vista, so be it.

[cybereality]

Call of Duty 4 (SP Demo):

-NV: Worked in 3d. HUD was correctly rendered. The gun looked *really* three-dimensional. However after playing for a minute or two I noticed that the background was 2D. It had separation, but both views were the same angle. The gun however was clearly in 3d, and looked like I could practically touch it. After much tweaking I realized this was a trick. Only the gun was 3D, everything else was 2D. Not only that, but there was some glitch where performance would drop to like 5 FPS, for no reason. Otherwise it would run fullspeed 60FPS, then it would start choking for no reason. Shuttering even, and go back and forth between good and bad performance. In 2D I get a silky smooth 100 FPS, its not an issue of the hardware.

On 'old' NV driver you had to push convergence quite high. There is a layer of PostProcessing, which has to be pushed of the screen. Behind that lies the buty of S-3D

Please tell me, if this should work on the newer NV drivers...

LukePC1, you were indeed correct. It is possible to set an obscenely high convergence value and get real stereo3d on COD4. You just need to keep holding F6 loooong time and it will push the 2 post-processing layers out of the way. I should have released this the second time I tested it, but I didn't. I have to admit, the 3d was pretty immersive after I used this tweak. Although the stereo image was a lower quality than with the iz3D driver, it still had a lot of depth. In some ways it was even more 3d looking than the iz3d version, but only because you need to set the convergence so high. In fact, it didn't even feel like the same game. However, without the post-processing layer you lose a lot of information. You can't see the HUD, or tell how much damage you've taken. Special weapons like sniper scopes and the rocket launcher are unusable, you have to switch to 2D mode. Plus the gun is seriously doubled up so shooting is more difficult in general. I still had the same performance issues at the beginning of the SP demo (but after the first segment performance is good). So, yes, COD4 is in full stereo3d with the "new" drivers.

Here is the thing, the new drivers aren't all that much different from the old ones as far as I can tell. So if it works on the old driver then it probably will work the same on the new one. They didn't seem to fix any of the old bugs, but there is a long list of "compatible" games. I also tried playing Crysis again. I had to turn shadows/water to low and set shaders/post-processing to medium. Boy does the game look like crap without the shadows. It seriously looks worse than the original Far Cry. It is in 3d, though, once you remove all the nice graphics.

[yuriythebest]

DX10 - show me 1 game that requires this. Crysis doesn't btw you can enable the highest setting in XP by hacking it a lil.

Keep in mind DirectX 9 came out in 2002. We are just recently seeing the full depth of dx9, *6 years later*. Dx10 just came out last year. Of course there isn't any game that requires it. No developer would shoot themselves in the foot like that. It would be like releasing a PC game only on Mac or something. But come one year, two years from now we will see things with dx10 that are not possible to hack in dx9. When that happens I want to be there and I'd like my computer to support it. If that means having the run Vista, so be it.

If a nice, castrated version of vista came out without the MS trojan horse, built for speed then I'd probably use it one day.

[cybereality]

If a nice, castrated version of vista came out without the MS trojan horse, built for speed then I'd probably use it one day.

Thats the kind of attitude that promotes stagnation in the industry. XP works good enough sure, but its not the best OS ever made in all honesty. New OSes are always slower, just like Windows98SE is probably faster than XP on the same machine. I'll admit, Vista is somewhat slower in some very specific situations, but on the whole it seems much faster than XP in other cases.

For example, launching games is much faster on Vista after a few weeks of use. Some games on XP could take up to 30 seconds to load, on Vista that can be cut down to like 5 seconds (due to the pre-cache). Game performance on Vista is totally acceptable, about on par with XP expect in some really heavy games like Crysis. In Vista you can run full HD 1080P video files as the desktop background without any kind of slowdown. Try doing that on XP and let me know how fast it goes (I've tried 3rd party apps to do this and its glitchy on XP). Vista boots up and shuts down very fast, at the same speed or quicker than XP. Most simple stuff, like just navigating windows, web-browsing, etc. seems the same on either OS. Vista really is not as slow as people like to claim it is.

[yuriythebest]

If a nice, castrated version of vista came out without the MS trojan horse, built for speed then I'd probably use it one day.

Thats the kind of attitude that promotes stagnation in the industry. XP works good enough sure, but its not the best OS ever made in all honesty. New OSes are always slower, just like Windows98SE is probably faster than XP on the same machine. I'll admit, Vista is somewhat slower in some very specific situations, but on the whole it seems much faster than XP in other cases.

For example, launching games is much faster on Vista after a few weeks of use. Some games on XP could take up to 30 seconds to load, on Vista that can be cut down to like 5 seconds (due to the pre-cache). Game performance on Vista is totally acceptable, about on par with XP expect in some really heavy games like Crysis. In Vista you can run full HD 1080P video files as the desktop background without any kind of slowdown. Try doing that on XP and let me know how fast it goes (I've tried 3rd party apps to do this and its glitchy on XP). Vista boots up and shuts down very fast, at the same speed or quicker than XP. Most simple stuff, like just navigating windows, web-browsing, etc. seems the same on either OS. Vista really is not as slow as people like to claim it is.

still, since I already have all my work stuff installed and configured for XP, I will only be dragged to vista for some critical reason. Atm I see none. Same as I would not currently change my pc even for free for a pc that's slightly newer and faster. If some cool thing like "Vista doubles the power of your cpu" feature was there sure, I'd move, but again no reason.

[cybereality]

still, since I already have all my work stuff installed and configured for XP, I will only be dragged to vista for some critical reason. Atm I see none. Same as I would not currently change my pc even for free for a pc that's slightly newer and faster. If some cool thing like "Vista doubles the power of your cpu" feature was there sure, I'd move, but again no reason.

Well I can agree there. Thats why I kept my XP machine for work, I just use my Vista machine for gaming at this point (it would take me months to get Vista configured like I have in XP). If you already have XP on an older machine, its not worth upgrading. If you buy a new, high-power machine, then Vista is fine. You just need the power to run it comfortably.

[LukePC1]

If a nice, castrated version of vista came out without the MS trojan horse, built for speed then I'd probably use it one day.

Thats the kind of attitude that promotes stagnation in the industry. XP works good enough sure, but its not the best OS ever made in all honesty.
[...]

that 'perfect' OS might be Linux or Mac

@ vista: it needs time. Drivers and games have to be coded for it to support it fully. ATM many look eqally good in DX9 or DX10.

And you are turning circles here all the time... it's nothing new

[chilledsanity]

But come one year, two years from now we will see things with dx10 that are not possible to hack in dx9

See that's just it. DX10's new features are very subtle compared to the big jumps that DirectX has seen in the past. Every "comparison" photo I've seen has been a joke, where the rendering has been artifically changed simply because a signal is being sent that the game is in DX9. Crysis is the best example, when there are workarounds in XP to enable the exact same thing that's been artificially tied to 9.0.

Thats the kind of attitude that promotes stagnation in the industry. XP works good enough sure, but its not the best OS ever made in all honesty. New OSes are always slower, just like Windows98SE is probably faster than XP on the same machine. I'll admit, Vista is somewhat slower in some very specific situations, but on the whole it seems much faster than XP in other cases.

You're driving me crazy making statements like this. How does wanting a product that's better than Vista stagnating the industry? No one is praising XP, it's simply that it's faster and more stable OS than Vista. I've said this before, I would LOVE to see an OS come out that's better than XP. However, Vista is not it. I was a very early adopter of XP and was pleased with it, because it had advantages over XP. The ONLY advantage I see to Vista over XP is the GUI. So if an OS looks better, but performs worse AND is less compatible, how does that make it better?

Yes, XP is slower overall than Windows 98SE, however Win98 was simply not stable. XP brought over the 32 bit kernel from the NT/2K line and actually brought a stable system to home consumers. It also added nice features like System Restore, and brought backwards compatibility options. So it was more stable than Windows 98, and more comaptible than Windows 2000. Besides the interface engine, what is better about Vista? Don't tell me how it's faster unless you can provide evidence backing up your data. And I don't mean ones between 2 different machines you have, I mean internet articles from professionals who know how to test machines.

Vista is slower in almost EVERY situation. In fact, show me one benchmark where Vista is FASTER in something than XP is. I've already linked some benchmarks to you in another thread, it's a cinch to find any that will show Vista as being slower than XP. The only difference is by how much. If you can't provide any evidence of it being faster, then there's no reason to believe it's true. Now in your case personally, your XP machine probably IS slower, because it could be configured poorly. I bet if you were to have someone look over it and gut out everything you don't need you'd be amazed at how much faster it would become. For example, type in "msconfig" in the Runbox and see how many programs you have loading at startup. I have 3, all of which I use. Every entry in there represents a program using up resources. As the saying goes, "Even a Ferrari is too slow if you don't know how to shift".

For example, launching games is much faster on Vista after a few weeks of use. Some games on XP could take up to 30 seconds to load, on Vista that can be cut down to like 5 seconds

What are you basing this on? Is this on the same machine? Are these both new installs of Vista and XP? I get the feeling your evidence is very skewed. Again with the car analogy. If you compare performance on a sports car that has flat tires to a clunker that's been recently tuned up, then the clunker is of course going to perform better.

[cybereality]

For example, launching games is much faster on Vista after a few weeks of use. Some games on XP could take up to 30 seconds to load, on Vista that can be cut down to like 5 seconds

What are you basing this on? Is this on the same machine? Are these both new installs of Vista and XP? I get the feeling your evidence is very skewed. Again with the car analogy. If you compare performance on a sports car that has flat tires to a clunker that's been recently tuned up, then the clunker is of course going to perform better.

I really don't want to get into a pissing match here. I was referring to a feature called "super-fetch" on Vista, benchmarks here:

http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/s ... hp?t=72298

Honestly, XP overall is a better OS. I am not contesting that. I'm just saying Vista isn't *that* bad. Jeez.

[chilledsanity]

Well I stand corrected, this is the first instance I've heard at Vista being faster at anything. I don't this justifies the OS, but I apologiize for thinking your claims were unfounded. I think there's a lot of room for improvement over XP, just even more improvement over Vista.