Nvidia Talks 3D Vision

The reason we chose active is because our market tends to be a little more demanding in terms of quality. I think passive glasses work well for theatres and some televisions, and we certainly support the passive 3D TV that LG brought to market with our 3DTV Play software. However, the benefits of active shutter glasses are quite obvious for a gamer who's sitting 1-2 feet in front of their display. You get full-resolution 3D, so when you play games with lots of text, such as World of Warcraft, Dungeon Siege or Fable 3, the text becomes hard to read using passive 3D because you only get half the resolution.

You also get a wider viewing angle with active shutter glasses, which has its benefits if you find yourself looking around. We're also designing our 3D Vision monitors with this 120Hz technology, which has benefits when you're not using 3D – you get the a really fast response time at 120Hz, so if you just want to do 2D you get an incredibly smooth gaming experience, and you simply don't get that with passive monitors today.


With that said, we're not autocratically being draconian and saying we're never going to do passive – we're looking at it, and there are products that may come out in the future that use 3D Vision to enable our experience on passive. We're not against it, we're exploring it and maybe in time you'll see products.

BT: Is 3D just a fad?

AF: The problem with people who say 3D is a fad is that they usually experienced 3D when it was really bad, so they remember the days of Elsa Revelator glasses and they say: 'Oh I saw it, it was horrible and it was no good.' If you show 3D to someone who's 15-20 years old today, they have no baggage left over from the bad 3D and their reaction is: 'Oh my god!'

People also say '3D is just a fad; it requires you to wear glasses and no one wants to wear glasses,' but try to imagine yourself ten years ago. If I said you'd be playing with a plastic guitar in your living room, or that you'd be dancing in front of your television to an invisible camera tracked your movement, you'd probably say 'that sounds stupid, I would never do that.' But Guitar Hero was one of the best-selling games ever, and Microsoft Kinect is now one of the most popular gaming peripherals.

BT: When do you think we'll start to properly see games with native 3D support?

AF: There are a couple of games that have already been developed in 3D. We worked with Ubisoft on James Cameron's Avatar, and we also worked with Crytek on Crysis 2. I think the major games studios will start to look at making true native games in 3D, but there are a whole load of game developers who are just happy to use our driver, because it can convert their game automatically with a minimal amount of effort on their part.


A great example of a big game publisher that's partnered with us is Epic. They made their entire UDK development engine - UDK3 - fully optimised for 3D Vision. They fixed all the issues so that a UDK3 developer with the latest version of the build has all the 3D Vision fixes built into it. They reaffirmed that this year at GDC 2011 with their Samaritan demo - in that demo they had physics, tessellation, DirectX 11 and 3D Vision as well.

BT: Is Nvidia working on glasses-free 3D technology?

AF: We're certainly looking at technology that can do it – I don't think we have any products announced for it, because if you look at these other alternative solutions for passive, as well as glasses-free, there's quality bar that's already been set, and our end users expect that – you can't change that quality bar.

BT: Will 3D always be a niche market?

AF: I don't think it will always be a niche market. I think you'll see a trend where more game developers add it to their games as options. I remember when people said that things like anti-aliasing, tessellation and shader would be niche for game developers, and all those technologies have sort of become the default. I don't think 3D is any different. I remember going to meetings where I've walked in and shown developers 3D, and they've been blown away.