The news from Nvidia is disappointing, but not unexpected. Nvidia doesn't make any money on their consumer S3D drivers and haven't for years but it looks like this will change with the Zalman deal. Yes, they may have sold more cards in the past because of S3D drivers, but that isn't anything they can put in a spreadsheet and present to their senior management come budget time because they really don't have any way of tracking how many additional cards they really sell due to S3D gamer loyalty. It's kind of hard to defend a position in front of management when you don't have a profitable model in place to justify the costs associated with development. I am not defending them, but understand the situation when it comes to software sales. Margin has to made on hardware and the software to be profitable, and you have to be able to calculate the cost of the software. They couldn't do this with the old "bundle it in for free' model.
genetic wrote:
Yes, look how far we have come.
Past: drivers were hard to come by. But they did come.
Now: No more drivers.
That is not a fair statement as expecting Neil, the leader of a very small advocacy group, to be able to change the direction of a 15 billion dollar organization overnight is unrealistic, especially when you consider "Overnight" in Nvidia time = a fiscal year. He is doing the right things and his recent meetings with David Cook are a great example. As you mentioned, he has been able accomplish things that the rest of S3D gamers only dream about... to leverage the presence of this advocacy group and provide visibility of the problem. Without this group, David Cook and other industry influentials would see him as just another angry end user of Nvidia products that wouldn't be listened to. Essentially, one in millions of angry users.
I hope the gas station doesn't refuse to refuel my car because it isn't a Maybach 62S.
That is too funny! Part of the issue is that we have been spoiled over the years. Nvidia has been including the "gas with the car" for many years and we have all been driving for free. Unfortunately, the gas costs money to produce and now must be financially justified. The Zalman deal is one way of doing just that. Selling your drivers on a per game basis is another, or setting up a yearly subscription would be another.
What makes me very optimistic about the future, and allows me to continue to be optimistic during announcements like this, is seeing new S3D displays hitting the market. Don't you think the senior management within these organizations are putting pressure on the industry as well to come out with drivers? Folks like Vuzix, TDVision, Samsung, Mitsubishi, etc all are taking a big risk by bringing products to market that depend on another organizations competency to either develop drivers or change the paradigm by not needing a drivers at all (Unigine). Samsung and Mitsubishi in particular carry a much bigger stick that we do in the form of the all mighty $! The more displays that are sold, the more software will be sold. Zalman was very smart by creating a partnership with Nvidia to insure the success of their own product, which pretty much follows Samsung's lead with DDD/TriDef. I am sure there are "teeth" in those agreements where xyz company must deliver on their promises. This is a positive sign from Nvidia in that at least they haven't totally abandoned driver development and the possibility exists for them to develop their own "sellable" drivers based on the model they have developed with Zalman. Pure speculation...
This isn’t about monitors at all. Please understand that those of us who use alternatives to a desktop monitor DON’T WANT TO USE A DESKTOP MONITOR. This is about projectors, HMDs, laptops, whatever.
I can agree with that. My gaming rig is hooked up to a HDTV and I wouldn't think about swapping over to monitor as it doesn't fit ergonomically.
All of the above are reasons why I think Neils efforts with Unigine are so valuable. The engine currently natively supports anaglyph and Dual Projection, the standards in the industry, and added IZ3D with others possibly on the way. Great approach to solving the problem, but a long term one. Even if 3rd party drivers are needed to convert to another 3d format, at least the stereo pair is rendered correctly by the engine and that is half of the battle.
PiXeL
