NVIDIA DRIVER NEWS, Your Thoughts?

Post by **Neil** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 11:06 am

Oh!

Read the current news from the Dave Cook interview. All Vista supported GPUs will work with the stereo drivers. That 8 series only news was based on an older story.

Regards,
Neil

Post by **toobs1234** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 4:37 pm

Unbelievable!!!

More than a year of waiting and now this. It will be a cold day in h*** before I buy another NVidia product. Good luck Neil with the Zalman owners (all twelve of them). That is going to be a far smaller market than it could have been. I know I am officially disgusted and done with 3D.

regards, John

Post by **pixel67** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 5:35 pm

chilledsanity wrote: Some of you are saying we haven't lost and everything's great, what options are there now for budget S-3D gamers, people who can't afford HMD's and custom monitors, but still have our shutter glasses?

As Neil mentioned in his earlier post, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to see a smaller, more agile company fill the void that Nvidia appears to have opened up, whether it is temporary or permanent. Personally speaking, if I were working for a company that manufactures S3D Drivers, I would be looking at this as one heck of an opportunity to expand my products capabilities as well as its userbase. A great example of this would be the folks at DDD/TriDef. Their current version of software may only support a dozen games right now, but it supports 16 different types of S3D monitors! Not bad when you consider there was NOTHING 5 months ago. Their Visualizer OpenGL Driver supports over 40 different displays!

An even better example is IZ3D's excellent drivers that all of the IZ3D owners are raving about. While IZ3D hasn't openly stated that they will change their current path, this represents an opportunity for them as well. I know that if I were using an existing CRT/Shutterglass system and IZ3D sold new drivers that saved the day, I would be looking at them very seriously when the time did come for me to upgrade my hardware. And let's be realistic, everyone WILL upgrade their display hardware at some point. But like you, I wouldn't want to be forced into it by the lack of drivers.

Call me stupid (many of you probably already have 8) ), but I put myself into this situation by selling my Infocus X3 and 7900GT's and buying the Samsung. While I miss playing Painkiller and Far Cry considerably, the visual quality of the Samsung is SOOO much better that it makes the tradeoff a little more acceptable during the wait for more games.

Cheers!

PiXeL

Post by **Mong** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 6:01 pm

Well the time is ripe to buy the iZ3D Monitor 8) ...the waiting game is OVER! nvidia.

If you can't beat them(nvidia)....leave them! and save up your money for the iZ3D 8) . That's what I've been doing for the past 8 months now.

But on a serious note, Neil keep up the good work and don't worry about the negative comments...were still friends right.

Post by **Znith** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 6:50 pm

I saw that post Neil and I'm glad it's gone. Just didn't seem like the normal Neil we all know

We all have an opinion on the situation and a lot of us don't know which way to turn right now (myself included). I'm confused and disappointed but I'll figure something out because I love S3D.

Maybe we need a venting forum subcategory?

Post by **Neil** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 6:51 pm

Thanks Mong!

Don't worry about me. 8)

Regards,
Neil

Post by **Neil** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 7:01 pm

Hi Znith!

Yeah! Venting categories!

1. Peaceful activists here.
2. Torches and pitchforks here.
3. Lynchings over here.

Everyone is welcome to express their opinions. That's what MTBS is all about! Just be respectful to me and the manufacturers.

Regards,
Neil

Post by **Hugo** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 8:40 pm

Now i dare to post too (... seen the deleted record as well).

My first idea after this info was to throw my glasses far away - remove 3D Control-Panel
and let´s have a look, which Hardware ATI is offering. All after being an NV-Fan-Boy since
Elsa Erazor X with Revelator (because they were the only 3d supporters).

Not necessary to say that í was waiting for postprocessing, multi-core and 88xx support for
my shutter-glasses. Some month ago, i had to buy a "new" iiyama ctr, because in europe there
wasn´t a decent other (3d)-solution for me (no place for projection and don´t like to order from
the states).

Already before the delete entry, my temper was realy bad, because i´ve seen my gaming-time
all over - after about 10 years playing in 3d, i´ll never go back to 2d. Better to stop playing.
Keeps wife lucky and wallet more filled as side effect .

Now i thought '.. so now, let´s have a look to this zalman.... would i have to order it from half the
earth as well.... do i have to spent thousands of euros?...'

No - it´s just about 580,- Euro in Germany. I think it´s a fair price.

So after the first panic, i´m close to be happy. Soon (after drivers are realy out) i´ll order a Zalman,
a 88xx and a new CPU.

But still, i think, it´s a very bad situation for the 3d-business now (... and as we linked to it, for us).

The major part of the gaming scene doesn´t even know, that there is a 3d technology since many
years. I´ve seen this just now, by searching for this zalman monitor. I´ll found 50 (unqualified) negative
statements for one positive.

Till now, just to test 3d, all you need is a nv-based gfx-card, install 3d-panel and buy some glasses. So it costs
the "tester" one hour of his time and some money.

Now the situation changed. No quick an cheap test will be possible anymore (old drivers won´t be
the solution, because quickly vista and multicore are the standard).

Post by **DDuckMan** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 12:16 pm

Add me to the list of people who are discouraged and unhappy with nVidia. I bought a 1000.00 24" CRT and a 8800 card for 3D gaming last year. Now I hate to think of what I went through and spent to get that monitor. It's a huge waste now. Thank god I hadn't gotten around to a projector setup yet.

Those of us who are not in a position to buy new displays are hosed as far as I can tell. How can I be optimistic about that?

Since the Revelator days I have only bought nVidia (and CRTs). Now they have lost any feelings of brand loyalty I ever had. In fact, I would rather buy ATI from now on if they are even close in performance.

Post by **Neil** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 3:25 pm

If you are interested, I wrote an article about this and started a related thread.

Regards,
Neil

Post by **Jahun** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 4:09 pm

So I don't follow this forum for a couple of weeks since it is so busy with work (S-3D!).. and what happens..

Nvidia dropped support for most of our setups... and is supporting Zalman exclusively.. *drops off chair* I didn't see that coming, since I still think the Zalman screen is so damn inferior.. but hey, who am I..

I will never ever buy the overpriced screen the Zalman is. For petes sake it is just some foil on a *random* LCD screen.. .. sell me the drivers instead Nvidia..

So we have this plethora of S-3D choices now... everyone is getting into the game with one leg in. Many people don't even buy either from the 2 choices of Blu Ray and HD-DVD and for S-3D there is alot more half baked options.. nice.

Post by **chilledsanity** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 11:41 pm

-If you don't own a 8000 series you're lucky. Just use the old drivers. They aren't new, but the work for many games.
- You are lucky again. They work with XP!
- Well Budget games and hardware work perfectly with the old driver. I use them myself - and won't waste money on a 'maybe' or 'we're going to...'

Yeah, and actually I like to play a lot of older games so there's still plenty of stuff for me to enjoy, however, it's more the future that I'm thinking of. I had to install newer drivers incompatible with S-3D to get Bioshock to run, and uninstalled them once I beat the game. Lots of newer games need fixes that are contained in drivers and now this limits what games you can play in the future in stereoscopic.

As Neil mentioned in his earlier post, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to see a smaller, more agile company fill the void that Nvidia appears to have opened up, whether it is temporary or permanent.

I hope so, that's pretty much the only hope for people on the low budget end of things. It's too bad E-dimensional's are so poor.

If you can't beat them(nvidia)....leave them! and save up your money for the iZ3D

That's a lot of saving depending on your income, about 20x more expensive than the LCD glasses. Plus when I was given a test run of the iz3d, I found the ghosting more pronounced than on my CRT. The drivers are obviously better, but I didn't like the effect as much (granted I didn't have a ton of time to test it).

1. Peaceful activists here.
2. Torches and pitchforks here.
3. Lynchings over here.

Post by **Znith** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:43 pm

Jahun wrote:So I don't follow this forum for a couple of weeks since it is so busy with work (S-3D!).. and what happens..

Nvidia dropped support for most of our setups... and is supporting Zalman exclusively.. *drops off chair* I didn't see that coming, since I still think the Zalman screen is so damn inferior.. but hey, who am I..

I will never ever buy the overpriced screen the Zalman is. For petes sake it is just some foil on a *random* LCD screen.. .. sell me the drivers instead Nvidia..

So we have this plethora of S-3D choices now... everyone is getting into the game with one leg in. Many people don't even buy either from the 2 choices of Blu Ray and HD-DVD and for S-3D there is alot more half baked options.. nice.

Jahun can you please tell us why the Zalman is so inferior? I haven't done as much research on this setup as compared to the IZ3D. Have you seen it in action?

Post by **Jahun** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:33 pm

Znith:

I've seen most 3D solutions in action, but not the Zalman I must admit. However, I was referring to price/technology/input.

Since it is a polarization solution, I'm sure it works quite well btw. Why I referred to it as being inferior:

-I see prices starting at 500$ and up. This is for a TFT screen with polarization foil. Probably a wave retarder or so since TFT is inherently polarized already. A random TFT screen (don't expect Zalman to have taken a super colorfull TFT panel for this) of those sizes are like 200$. I personally think 300$ for the addition of the foil is hefty.

-In 3D you get half resolution on the vertical axis (ok perhaps it is in a checkerboard pattern, that would make it less noticable..)

-They had no drivers themselves at first, now Nvidia is probably coming up with some which require quite specific OS and new video card. This makes it a tad less "plug and play".

I am just saying they are putting a (perhaps very nice) screen on the market which I think could have used a bit more effort for that 500$+. At least from IZ3D you get nice drivers and some technologically tricky system. They at least spent some R&D on it.

My point is that it is overly priced imho, and if anyone has a reason to think otherwise I am very open to hear their points.

ps removed.. perhaps the Nvidia drivers detect if a correct screen is attached..

pps: Nvidia.. drivers I need

I'm not going from 2 meters wide to 22"

Post by **DickDastardly** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:07 pm

Sheesh. How is it that an $18 Billion company apparently can't afford to employ even one vaguely competent person to promote the only feature which in any way distinguishes their products from the competition (apart from a handful of frames per second)? Not one gamer in a thousand could tell from watching a game in 2D whether it's running on nVidia or ATI hardware, yet show them a game running in 3D on a DLP projector with shutterglasses and nVidia's stereo drivers and they're blown away. Most can't believe such a feature has existed for years yet they're never heard of it.

And the totally baffling thing is that nVidia have been sitting on this absolutely killer feature for the best part of a decade, letting it languish with a total lack of commitment, investment and promotion. I've never seen stereoscopic 3D capability mentioned in a single advert from nVidia, or on their home page. In fact I've never even heard of any attempt by nVidia to promote stereoscopic 3D to either the public or game developers. Nor have I ever seen anyone from the company respond to a single question, suggestion or complaint on their own 3D stereo forum, much less anywhere else. In fact the only communication the community receives is a dribble of "unofficial" leaks via Neil on a site with a couple of thousand members.

And now OVER A YEAR AND A HALF since the last official driver release, we're finally told that the new driver:

1. ONLY "OFFICIALLY" WORKS ON ONE BRAND OF (VERY EXPENSIVE) MONITORS!
2. Won't be out for at least another couple of months.
3. Only works on an OS which is notorious (amongst many other failings) for giving considerably worse performance in games than its predecessor.
4. STILL doesn't support any post processing effects, or to put it another way. doesn't properly support any game made in the last couple of years or the future.

The only small ray of hope for me is the line that "unofficially, other things may be in the works" with respect to the utterly idiotic initial "Zalmon only" policy. My own estimation is that calculating an image for each eye is probably about 99% of the work involved in displaying in stereo, whereas the final step of taking those two images and displaying them as an analygraph, or sequentially for page flipping shutterglasses, or interlaced etc is probably less than 1%. Presumably then, even nVidia won't be stupid enough to skimp on that final 1%, thereby making the rest of their efforts completely pointless to those of us without Zalman monitors. If not, the probability of my next graphics card being an nVidia just declined by 50%.
Cheers,
DD

P.S. nVidia have a "head of stereo driver development"??? Sounds like my dream job - 50 weeks holiday a year and apparently his boss doesn't care if anything's actually produced during the two weeks he does bother to turn up.

Post by **b4thman** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:12 am

I´m thinking seriusly about to buy an ATI card next month if all continues like this notice. I think Stereo3D is died for me, only for old games is working properly, and very abusive news for the future. I´m tired waiting for nothing. No information, and when at last there is some words they are like these... buy a better graphic, buy a new OS, buy a new stereo monitor... and there is no choice, you MUST buy what I want. Sorry, if I do this I would be a complete idiot.

Please Nvidia, do not say false things about a driver developement group working in this.

Post by **wuhlei** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 1:51 pm

Nvidia has great driver support im suprised they always update thier drivers and they even fix bugs on old cards.

Post by **chilledsanity** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 2:25 pm

Sheesh. How is it that an $18 Billion company apparently can't afford to employ even one vaguely competent person to promote the only feature which in any way distinguishes their products from the competition (apart from a handful of frames per second)?

I'm guessing shitty management unless it's something more sinister.

Not one gamer in a thousand could tell from watching a game in 2D whether it's running on nVidia or ATI hardware, yet show them a game running in 3D on a DLP projector with shutterglasses and nVidia's stereo drivers and they're blown away

Actually, I will say this, I did a lot of tests when I switched back to Nvidia (solely for stereo) and ATI definitely has superior AA quality for the sample size. 2x on ATI looks almost like 4X on NVidia, 4x like 8x, etc. Also their Adaptive AA worked in more areas than Nvidia's TSAA. This is a really subtle difference though, nothing compared to 3d.

No information, and when at last there is some words they are like these... buy a better graphic, buy a new OS, buy a new stereo monitor... and there is no choice, you MUST buy what I want. Sorry, if I do this I would be a complete idiot.

Yeah for real, I don't have any money to buy something else, if I did no way I'm going to support Nvidia now that their drivers are inferior to competitors (what few there are)

Nvidia has great driver support im suprised they always update thier drivers and they even fix bugs on old cards.

Which is exactly why this is such a slap in the face to the existing S-3D. It's not like they can't afford to maintain it.

Post by **Xerion** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 2:33 pm

Nvidia are actually making their drivers worse all the time for me. AA settings haven't been working in recent drivers. And further, something i found out today... I installed a new copy of windows and it turns out custom resolutions in new control panel work incorrect and in old control panel don't work at all. This is the case is several recent drivers I tried, the only reason they are working on my old windows install is because I installed newer drivers over older. Because I'm using a 8800GT besides my 7900GT which I still use for stereo I can't even use an older driver. If they keep this up my next card might be AMD/ATI, seems my old (and not working very well anymore) 7900GT will be the only card I can still use for some stereogaming on my (active) projection system anyway... (And no, the zalman isn't for me)

Post by **vendu** » Sun Jan 27, 2008 7:21 am

After reading these news from Nvidia I canceled my 8800GTS 512mb order and bought used 7900GTX. I am sticking on XP for now (hopefully not forever!!??).

Regards,

Vendu

ps. also bought used Ageia physx -card to be able to test cellfactor: Combat Training in S3D ... Works nicely

-----------------------------------------------
HP EP7122 projector (1024X768@85Hz) + Edimensional 3D glasses

Post by **user456** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 12:27 pm

I built a new gameing computer 2 years ago . Bought the the 8800 gts card , thinking they would be coming out with the stereo drivers . I had purchase a stereo head set also. Nvidea was the card for Direct x 10 . also decided since x 10 was only going to be vista, I added it to a new raptor hardrive. I just recently unpacted the 3d stero headset ect. because it looks like they are finally going to come out with drivers for that card. I am looking forward to finally experiencing 3d stereo. Hope the glasses I bought arent to obselete , Ha. They cost 1200 bucks. The flight sim x will soon have a direct x 10 patch, it would be awsom if no limits coaster was x10. Maybe it will still work with the stereo drivers. I wanted to build a motion patform but it cost to much at the time. I ended up installing the Butt Kicker to my recliner and use my HD big screen for a monitor. It would be cool having my own vr pod, ha. I live in fairbanks alaska, 13 miles from the real town of Northpole. Its cold and its dark in the winter!! Tom

Post by **GT-Force** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 9:55 pm

Version: 181.14
Release Date: June/July, 2008
Operating System: Windows Vista32/64

--------------------------------------------------

Version: 91.31
Release Date: June 29, 2006
Operating System: Windows 2000/XP

--------------------------------------------------

Version: 61.76
Release Date: July 20, 2004
Operating System: Windows 9x/ME

Post by **DickDastardly** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 3:28 pm

From the main page: "There was also a false rumor going around that the NVIDIA drivers are going to be Zalman only. As I hinted at before, they are starting as Zalman only, but additional solutions will be added to the mix over time."

Phew! -well at least that's one bit of good news

. The real question now is: How long is "over time"? We already know the Feb/March driver release will be completely useless to the 99.9% of us who don't have both Vista and a Zalmon monitor. So if the driver releases are supposed to be bi-monthly can we expect something a bit more useful (i.e. XP drivers which work with shutterglasses) by May, or are nVidia's 3D team really going to allow more than 2 years(!) to pass between XP releases?
Cheers,
DD

P.S. A suggestion for the website: How about some kind of poll for members to fill in, giving details of which OS, graphics card, drivers, 3D hardware, display hardware etc we use. I suspect that the majority of us are using shutterglasses but it would be interesting to see exactly how popular the various solutions are. Also, if it turns out that most of us are using XP and shutterglasses, maybe the poll would help give nVidia a small kick up the backside to focus their efforts more on these rather than $10k HDTVs (which might be great for running demos on at a trade show, but are of very limited interest to non-lottery winners).

Post by **Likay** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 6:11 pm

Somebody should tip microsoft about of how many that will get vista when there finally is a functional stereodriver for vista.

Nvidiacard only is still not a desired solution since all the ati-owners also must have a chance to run stereo3d.
Guess time will show.

cheers

Post by **Okta** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 4:48 pm

Well now there is a working Vista beta driver out so you can install that if you like. Not me, i intend to ignore vista and see if its still around in a year or two.

Im still very dirty on nvidia for not supporting there massive xp using customer base but instead towing the MS line and leaving us with a crippled driver while the useless and doomed vista absorbes all the support xp should be getting.

Pure marketing bullshit.

Post by **CarlKenner** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:25 pm

Watch it okta. Nvidia has had perfectly good XP stereo drivers for many, many years.
What they didn't have were Vista drivers, and that is what they should have, and did, release.

Post by **Okta** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 3:57 am

Watch it carlkenner. That is still no excuse to cripple the drivers in there flagship cards.

Post by **RAGEdemon** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 7:38 am

"There was also a false rumor going around that the NVIDIA drivers are going to be Zalman only. As I hinted at before, they are starting as Zalman only, but additional solutions will be added to the mix over time."

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Most stereo gamers probably know this but for those who don't, the hardest part in the dev of the stereo driver is the separation and depth generation from a "2D" game. In comparison, after this has been done, adding support for different technologies is a relatively trivial task, be it page-flipping, anaglyph, dual head, interlaced etc.

Especially noteworthy are the almost identical processes between anaglyph and page-flipping (field sequential stereo).

If anaglyph is there but field sequential support isn't there, then it's not there for a reason - not because they are still working on it, but because it's a conscious decision to not include it.

Folks, the "additional solutions" almost certainly doesn't mean page-flipping support. Don't hold your breath for this feature being added anytime soon, if ever.

What it does mean is that support will be added for other solutions if their manufacturers want to license the driver, ie Head Mounted Displays (z800 etc), iZ3D screen, Dual Head etc.

Post by **nubie** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 10:33 am

Even if they turn it into a commercial option for the consumer I wouldn't mind.

Dual VGA and Planar couldn't be simpler, Just draw each eye to it's own buffer, with planar you mirror one of the buffers.

If they go to a consumer 3D stereo option I would buy it. Because they charge for it they will have the resources and the motivation to upgrade. All of the profits should go directly to funding the development of the 3D drivers.

They could use their clout in the "Way its meant to be played" arena to get the games ready for 3D.

Unfortunately I don't think that it will be that easy. If an XP driver never comes out we have to wait for Vista maturity (or possibly forever) before we can game properly in 3D using nVidia products like we used to.

I bought an 8800GT and was horrified at the support, so I sold it again. The 9600GT 512MB looks like a killer card option, but are there any drivers? I doubt it.

With the way the video card scene is changing I am just going to wait until a 7900 series with 512MB of ram is priced reasonably and then overclock the heck out of it, possibly with a heat-pipe cooler.

I am still waiting for an elegant 3D solution, I like Planar, and I may buy dual 19" monitors and some half-mirrored glass to try again. If I can get the top screen to mirror by messing with the LCD screen's bios, then all I need is a standard dual VGA output on the video, the game could even handle that with nVidia merely providing the Span function. Obviously this could work with AMD/ATi products at that point (possibly even any videocard, with a matrox dualhead2go), and AMD is really coming back into the market.

My ultimate would be minimum 1280x720 or 960 in a headmounted setup for under $500. It will get there, I hope sooner. There are quite a few screens small enough that I am considering a Helmet mounted HMD. With 10" high-res screens and front surface mirror for the left eye.

All of this goes out the window when Vista ruins video card driver development, and doesn't even acknowledge 3D stereoscopy in DirectX "for the future", that is a freaking rip-off.

Post by **wuhlei** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 8:53 pm

Okta wrote:Well now there is a working Vista beta driver out so you can install that if you like. Not me, i intend to ignore vista and see if its still around in a year or two.

Im still very dirty on nvidia for not supporting there massive xp using customer base but instead towing the MS line and leaving us with a crippled driver while the useless and doomed vista absorbes all the support xp should be getting.

Pure marketing bullshit.

sorry I agree with this but I dont know if its 100% true I don't think its all nvidias fault?

Post by **nubie** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 10:29 pm

Agreed, what was nvidia supposed to do? Drop the ball on Vista and leave everyone hanging who had to buy a new PC in the last year?

You or I can ignore Vista, but its installed base is only getting larger, and with the "made for windows" crap (presumably it isn't possible to play games on a computer without the precious windows /sarcasm ), there isn't much choice but to follow M$ if you want to keep selling your product.

Post by **Okta** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 3:16 am

I dont think there is much need to look to far into it.

It is a conscious decision by Nvidia not to enable certain features on the 8xxx series (such as 3d stereo and theater mode full screen video) that were supported in the previous generation. After the amount of money,time, research and logistics involved in the entire 8xxx series, to believe that these features were impossible to enable is odd.

Its common for hardware/software companies to push aside the old for the new or why would anyone buy the latest toys if the old toys were still doing the job just as well or better?

Nvidia are giving the push towards the 9xxx on vista where we see a return of 3d stereo but with a no free lunch policy in that its only intended for paying customers of Zalman who they have agreements with. Why give away something for free if you can charge money for it?

We are now rather than waiting as we were before, dreaming that nvidia will throw us a bone in the form of a generic 8xxx xp driver where lots of us are sitting for use with shutter/hmd etc but now more than ever it seems unlikely.

Post by **zebrastealer** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 6:39 am

I had also been trying to hold out hope that NVidia would provide us a generic 3d driver, obviously that just isn't going to happen. The most irratating thing about this is that NVidia didn't just put out something official stating they had no intention of developing a future generic driver. Had they bothered to let us know a year ago - even with a simple post on their own 3d forum then it would have saved a lot of us time and money (I bought equipment believing a new driver would be forthcoming).

Actually on 2nd thought, even more irratating is that I'll probably still end up using and buying NVidia graphics cards in the future because the truth is their high end cards are superior to the competition from ATI. Unless of course ATI had their own stereo driver, than that would be a good reason to trade performance for functionality. However, we all know that te possibliity that ATI is developing a 3d driver is about as likely as NVidia renewing their own support.

So, its looking like IZ3d is the way to go - those guys seem like they run a good ship over there - very active in their forums and customer support seems top notch. I've been holding off getting one of thier monitors for awhile, but it looks like that really is the only good way to go. I wonder, if you have an IZ3d monitor, will you also be able to use their universal driver for free after it comes out? Makes the monitor even more appealing...especially if you've got a dual passive projector system gathering dust at the moment.

Post by **wuhlei** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 9:18 am

for all we know the everyone at nvidia could feel the same way? It cost them money to make new drivers for vista and a lot of people still use xp.

Post by **RAGEdemon** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 1:30 pm

I think it is important to take note of a few things.

Yep boys and girls, it's time for uncle RAGEdemon to start another rant...

nVidia have said on a few occasions that thye are "comitted" to Stereo3D And Yes we understand that nVidia have to make money... its a business after all, and the primary goal of any business is to make money - But:

1) If nVidia gave us the chance, we would have bought the stereo driver for an additional cost and this would have amounted to much more money than licensing it to Zalman or anyone else.
Look at iZ3D. They are going to be selling their far superior driver and a lot of people said they would buy it. These people who have "said so" in the thread are of course just the tip of the iceberg. nVidia's DVD Player "NVDVD" sales integrate into their current business model. Why can't another piece of their software?

Of course I use my iZ3D for stereo gaming almost daily so it's no skin off my back. What I am concerned about is the damage this is doing to our friends in the stereo3D community. nvidia take note: we stereo gamers don't give a flying fcuk if it is going to support more licenced solutions in the future. If it doesn't support Page Flipping (who is going to license this open technology?), which the vast majority of us use, then it's useless to us.

2) From a financial and logical standpoint: There are significantly more GAMERS out there with an 8XXX card that use XP than there are Gamers with an nVidia card that run Vista. Just look at these boards and the "Sign here if you plan to buy a 8800 for stereo3d!" thread over at the nVidia forum in contrast to the 15% of all gamers that use Vista in a recent survey by Valve (makers of Half-life and Counterstrike).

Vista is NOT the future. It is a lame duck and gamers know it. There is only a tiny percentage of serious gamers (read potential and current stereo3D adopters) who would consider "upgrading" to vista. Microsoft are working on a new OS... the focus this time is on efficiency and compatibility... call it the anti-vista. A couple of years down the line, Most people will bypass Vista straight onto the new OS, assuming its not an even bigger disaster than its predecessor was, and Vista will be forgotten.

In summary, it is financially the wrong move, it is logically the wrong move, it pisses off most of the installed stereo3D userbase and it severely hinders stereo3D uptake by the general population.

Congratulations nVidia. You Fail.

From where I'm standing, it was a bad executive decision from some VIP who doesn't know the real facts about the scene. It seems more like a publicity stunt than anything else... something they can market... "we support Stereo3D in WindowsXP AND Windows Vista". Woop de bloody doo! Here, have some cake... its so delicious and moist.

Post by **Tril** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:26 pm

RAGEdemon, I agree with most of what you said. However, I don't think that Vista is as bad as you and others are trying to make us believe.

I recently switched to Windows Vista 64 bits and it's a perfectly fine OS to play games. I use a GeForce 8600 GT video card. I decided to go for Vista 64 bits for two main reasons :
- DirectX 10 support
- I have 4 GB of RAM and only a 64 bit version of Windows can let me use it all

NVIDIA needs to add 64 bit support to their Vista stereo drivers. I must not be the only one that switched to Vista 64 bits for these two reasons.

There's one thing I would like NVIDIA to do. It would be some kind of compromise between making a pageflipping driver and not making one. I've said it before (in the wrong thread) but I'd like NVIDIA to make an SDK for developpers that would enable developpers to easily add pageflipping support to their games/stereo drivers. The problem with pageflipping and DirectX is that the way DirectX is currently made, you can't send a frame to be displayed to the video card before you are finished rendering the current frame.

At 120 Hz, displaying one frame takes 8.33 ms. Let's say you are using pageflippping at 120 Hz. If rendering takes more than 8.33 ms, you can't send a frame to the video card in time to keep in sync with the refresh rate. One way to solve this would be to tell to the video card drivers, if we are sending in a left or a right eye view. The card would keeps both eyes frames in memory in two differents buffers. The card would then display the content of these two buffers, one after the other. The card itself would choose which eye to display without any intervention from the cpu. This would allow the card to keep in sync perfectly with the glasses, no matter how slow DirectX sends new frames to the video card. I don't know how the architecture of the NVIDIA cards is but they most probably have some kind of FPGA chip on their cards or something to do some advanced programmed stuff on the cards. If not, what I'm proposing is impossible, the way I explained and if they do, what I'm suggesting is possible. They could incorporate this feature in their official regular drivers.

Something like this could be used by NVIDIA, iZ3D, Vuzix, uniengine and others to easily add shutter glasses support to games or stereo drivers for NVIDIA video cards. This would once again give an advantage to NVIDIA compared to the competition because they would be the only one to have that feature.

Post by **wuhlei** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:29 pm

I love linux too bad there is little 3d support for it. =(

Post by **chilledsanity** » Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:43 pm

However, I don't think that Vista is as bad as you and others are trying to make us believe.

It depends on how it affects you. If your printer or scanner no longer works with Vista, that's bad news. There's already a big fiasco as to how Creative Xi-Fi soundcards don't work properly vista and lack all the features that they have on XP. I personally use the Software Development Kit for the Source game engine a ton and I've had to turn down multiple volunteers who wanted to help me because they used Vista and I've discovered that Vista breaks certain aspects of it from functioning properly. I personally like to play a lot of old games and while there have been many improvements since launch, the list of incompatible windows games for Vista is notable. I don't know of any speed improvements Vista has over XP. I don't know of features Vista has (except for Aero interface) that I didn't enable in XP via 3rd party software years ago. As I see it, Vista is a slower, less compatible, and more resource intensive OS.

As for DirectX 10, I will say that DX10 has subtle visual improvements over DX9, however the speed cost doesn't seem to be worth it. Here are some benchmarks worth looking at:

link

Those are both on a Vista machine (which isolates the DirectX difference), the only difference is DX9 v. DX10. Also in this instance, there's no clear visual difference between the two:

link

As Ragedemon said, MS is now focusing on Windows 7, which is being toted as the "anti-vista", throwing out a lot of old code and being optimized for performance, so Vista isn't the future anymore than Windows ME was. If Vista works for you, great. I just wouldn't underplay the issues that surround it.

Post by **nubie** » Sat Apr 26, 2008 11:43 am

I have to agree, Vista is a "new os" without a new core (my PC repair teacher called it ME2), I don't know what it is good for, I can only hope in a couple years a service pack can transform it into a usable OS (without all of the stupid "happy settings boxes" that I need to deal with to change every little setting).

As for the drivers, I think it is pretty clear (now that I have a g80 card and have tried the 171.23 forceware drivers from guru3d.com, Edit, real nice, suddenly G U R U 3 D.com is a bad word? How about hosting the driver so I don't have to point people away to another site?), that the drivers are almost entirely functional, except they page-flip my Planar setting

(both screens are up and drawn correctly, but are page-flipped onto the top of each other).

I don't know what they are thinking, but this kind of crass abandonment of gamers that are perfectly willing to line their pockets with filthy lucre (read $$$-paying early adopters with lots of 3D screen pixels to drive)

I am 100% behind the payed 3D drivers idea, and I think that nVidia shies away from that purely so that it doesn't need to develop them (I am more confused as to how this Zalman thing is going down, how can Zalman expect to sell a product to gamers that doesn't run on XP with an 8800 series card?

) .

After all, they can turn a blind eye and have no legal obligation. They can even point out that their last official 3D driver died 2 years ago (and maybe we should as well? Not a positive message nVidia)

If I was nVidia I wouldn't acknowledge the 3D either, knowing the way it is being handled by them. The real kick in the nuts of us users of 3D is that they are boldly touting their support of 3D, and judging from at least one review people are drinking the kool-aide, while anyone not willing to drop $500 + on a simple LCD and buy Vista, and then buy a 3D card is left out of functional drivers and forced onto the aging 7900 series (while the 7900 series can pack a great wallop, I am finding it increasingly useless in the "shader wars" that are going on now, anyone remember the "bump mapping wars"? These "features" don't take the place of proper game design, and they shouldn't be used as digital make-up when you are whoring out your latest NFS/Madden cookie cutter game, with the same gameplay, mildly enhanced graphics, and dog slow response to the controls, no matter the FPS)

Post by **InCytE** » Sat Apr 26, 2008 5:08 pm

I'm 100% with zebrastealer on this one. If they had let the community know that "free" S-3D support (even though I payed good money to nvidia for their hardware that had this feature) was ending I would have moved on with disappointment but no hard fellings. But since they went the route they did I have no choice but look to a company that has shown tremendous support and respect for the S-3D community, iZ3D. As soon as the boss (read wife) gives me the go ahead I will be ordering one of these fine monitors. As for Nvidia, I may look to them again some time in the future.
*EDIT*
I am sorry for my negativity towards nVidia. They deserve better. Without nVidia I would never have gotten into S-3D. But now that we have a manufacture that is part of the S-3D community (iZ3d LLC), I will only consider nVidia when they show a similar commitment and show the respect that is deserved to the S-3D community that iZ3D LLC continues to exibit.

NVIDIA DRIVER NEWS, Your Thoughts?

Hi From Alaska