[by Ben Hardwidge, bit-tech.net]

The critics said 3D was a fad that would soon follow Bad Mouth Billy Bass and Crazy Frog singles into the landfill site of novelty obsolescence, and that no one would want to wear 3D glasses in front of their screen. Nevertheless, a couple of years later we’re still being bombarded by 3D movies and technology, and stereoscopic 3D finally appears to be gripping at least a large part of the consumer tech industry. 

One of the key pioneers in 3D PC gaming was Nvidia, bringing out its 3D Vision kits back in 2008 – well before the mainstream 3D uprising really took off. The company not only supports 3D gaming, but makes its own active shutter glasses and USB emitters. But will 3D gaming really take off, what are the benefits of active shutter glasses, and just how much of a threat is posed by AMD’s new HD3D technology? We’re joined by Nvidia’s senior product manager for 3D Vision Andrew Fear, and 3D Vision product manager Phil Eisler to discuss Nvidia’s 3D strategy.

Bit-Tech: In basic terms, how does 3D Vision work?

Andrew Fear: We have a system that consists of an Nvidia GeForce GPU, our 3D Vision glasses, a 3D Vision monitor and our 3D Vision driver. As the data for the game comes into the graphics processor, the 3D Vision driver essentially renders two views. It takes the DirectX information, which contains modelling, shading and everything, and creates two different views dynamically in real-time. We then take those two images, send them to a monitor running at 120Hz, and it renders left-right, left-right in that order. Then our 3D Vision emitter synchronises with our glasses and tells the active shutter glasses when to shut the left eye, and when to shut the right eye.

BT: What’s the take-up of 3D Vision been like?

AF: Really good. If you have a look at the television market, you’ll see some reports saying that 3D televisions are doing horribly, and others saying it’s fantastic, and the reality is that it’s somewhere in the middle. If you look at the data, the trend shows that the market for 3D televisions has basically been doubling from year to year, and will probably continue to double in sales until about 2014. The PC market is on a very similar trajectory of sales. We’ve sold multiple hundreds of thousands of pairs of 3D Vision glasses. 

In fact, the core gaming audience is getting more excited about 3D in some cases than SLI. The benefit of 3D over technologies like SLI is that it’s immediate, rather than just a performance benefit. Some people love that, but for others it’s imperceptible; with 3D it’s an instantaneous experience. If you get a game you love and play it in 3D, all of a sudden you go ‘wow!’

BT: This isn’t the first time Nvidia’s done 3D. What’s changed since the last time?

AF: I’ve been here 10.5 years, and I remember when I first started here – I came here from 3dfx – one of the first things I was asked to do was figure out how to sell our 3D drivers. And, to be honest with you, it didn’t work then, for a lot of reasons. 

I guess you’d call the model for 3D back in 2000 an open standard. There were people who made glasses, people who made graphics processors, people who made drivers and people who made displays. The idea was that we were all going to make them come together and work, but the reality was that it didn’t work well. There wasn’t really a strong motivation to partner together and produce a high quality experience where the glasses worked great with the display and the drivers worked properly, so it kind of all failed.

So when we looked at it about four years ago, we decided to come up with a better model. One of the biggest problems was the lack of quality in ensuring that it was a wonderful out-of-the-box experience with customers. We needed to get 3D to work on an LCD monitor and produce high-quality glasses that people would want. So we married those two parts of the technology with the driver, and came up with 3D Vision. We have patents issued on the technique for doing 3D on an LCD desktop monitor, because we helped to pioneer that. 

We then set out to produce really high-quality glasses – we’re pretty proud of them, and they’ve received a pretty good response from the community. Then we worked a lot on our software to make sure that it all worked together, and that’s how 3D Vision was born.

BT: 3D Vision uses Nvidia 3D glasses and USB emitters, while AMD’s HD3D system uses glasses that come with the TV and third-party 3D middleware. AMD says its system eliminates USB latency, and also ensures the glasses are properly synchronised with the TV. What are the advantages of a tied-in system such as 3D Vision?

AF: Well, let’s first of all comment on USB latency. For about six months we’ve been working with notebook and display manufacturers to integrate embedded emitters directly inside products. Notebooks started shipping with embedded emitters in November last year, and Acer’s already shipping embedded-emitter monitors. There are no USB latency issues with these.

Phil Eisler: Latency isn’t really a problem for the emitter anyway. The emitter is fundamentally just sending out a clock signal, and we actually have a flywheel on the glasses so it doesn’t need a signal very often. It’s just comparing the sync and making minor adjustments to keep the timing in line, and it just needs a tick from the system every second or so to adjust the synchronisation.

BT: Would an embedded emitter work with any 3D shutter glasses, or just 3D Vision glasses?

AF: We design embedded emitters for our glasses, because we focus on making a high quality experience. In our experience, if you try to take the model of ten years ago, throw 3D to the wind and say ‘please make glasses for us,’ and hope it all works together, then the end result isn’t a good experience. You get glasses with different ghosting characteristics, glasses that have faulty lenses – lots of different problems. It would be like Apple saying it was going to build an iPod, but it was going to rely on someone else to build iTunes and count on Warner Brothers to provide the music. That model just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

BT: AMD also says there are benefits to the open nature of HD3D, though. Its driver will work with any HDMI 1.4a TV without needing any specific hardware.

AF: We have two different product offerings – 3DTV Play and 3D Vision. So we do have a driver architecture that allows you to connect a GeForce GPU to an HDMI 1.4a TV – you can use the glasses that come from the manufacturer – Panasonic, LG, Samsung – whatever it is. We sell that software online, and it enables you to access 3D games, our streaming capability and our photo-viewing capability – all the features that we’re doing. 

So we’re exactly the same as AMD, and in fact we’re better I would say, because in order to do that on AMD you have to find a third-party driver from DDD or iZ3D that makes it all work. We make the driver ourselves, so in some ways we have a better strategy, because we’re responsible for the drivers. If you’ve got a problem with your game, you can just come direct to Nvidia – we make the graphics cards, the 3D drivers and we work with the game developers. If you’re buying an AMD solution, who do you call when you’ve got a problem with your game – DDD or AMD?

With 3D Vision, we make everything, so both end users and OEMs know who to come to when there’s a problem. I think AMD’s strategy is a little bit different – as an OEM you’d have to go to maybe three or four people to try to resolve your problem.
BT: AMD says that HD3D works on both HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort. However, 3D Vision doesn’t support 3D over DisplayPort yet. Are there any plans to support DisplayPort in the future?

AF: Well, we don’t support DisplayPort because no monitors are built to support it yet and, to be honest with you, the problem with DisplayPort today is that the number of GPUs sold with it is pretty limited. The fact is there are 150 million GPUs that support dual-link DVI – every single GPU since the GeForce 8-series supports dual-link DVI. So if you’re going to try to build a monitor with DisplayPort, you’ve got to tell every single customer that owns a dual-link DVI GPU to buy this $100 dongle to convert from DVI to DisplayPort.

But I would imagine in the future that 3D Vision monitors may include a DisplayPort connector, and we certainly aren’t preventing it, it’s just that there hasn’t been strong demand for it.

BT: 3D Vision specifically uses active shutter glasses, but some companies such as Oakley say that passive glasses are superior for a number of reasons. Why are you solely using active glasses, and would you consider using passive glasses in the future?

AF: The market is certainly trying to create a format war between active and passive, and to be honest I don’t believe there is a format war – it’s kind of silly. They try to raise the analogy between formats like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but with active vs passive it really doesn’t matter – it’s like asking if you want to view your movie on a projector or a big-screen TV – the input that gets it there is the same.

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.

See the full story with MANY images here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/05/24/nvidia-talks-03d-vision/1