[CNET]
There has been much talk over the past two years about 3D televisions, 3D movies, and even handheld 3D game consoles. Less widely discussed is one of the easiest and most versatile ways to get into stereoscopic 3D: the 3D laptop. After seeing a handful of 3D systems in each of the previous few years, 2011 has become the year of the 3D laptop, with half a dozen crossing our desks so far this year.
Most of them follow a similar hardware path, pairing a set of active-shutter 3D glasses with a compatible 120Hz display and a supported video card from Nvidia, forming a stereoscopic ecosystem known as 3D Vision (a bit of Nvidia branding).
That particular setup remains the gold standard for 3D, allowing for plenty of flexibility in the use of 3D videos, Blu-ray discs, and video games. But, there are other options. We’ve seen a handful of 3D laptops (but only one so far this year) that uses a competing 3D app from TriDef with either active or passive glasses–but we’ve found the processing overhead required for that implementation to be too onerous. In this respect, the 3D landscape for laptops has changed surprisingly little since we first dived deeply into it a couple of years ago.
Standing apart from any of those is the Toshiba F755, a CES prototype brought to life, offering decent glasses-free 3D on a 15-inch screen. It’s more of a proof-of-concept piece than anything else, but it works well for watching 3D Blu-ray discs. It doesn’t yet support video games, which would be a pretty cool killer app (and is expected later this year as a GPU driver update).
For now, if you’re very interested in a 3D laptop, a more traditional Nvidia 3D laptop with the packed-in glasses and a 3D emitter built into the chassis is probably the best way to go. A big part of the appeal will be for gamers, who on their living room consoles are locked into games specifically designed to work in 3D. In the world of PC 3D, in contrast, you can literally try to play any game on a 3D laptop.
Since the 3D Vision system simply exposes the 3D data already in the game, you’ll see what’s actually there. The effect doesn’t always work, and frequently exposes the shortcuts game makers take in creating virtual worlds, but if you’ve ever wanted to play games such as Portal or Dragon Age in 3D, this is the only way to do it (and those two are examples that work pretty well). You do take a knock to the frame rate, as the PC has to work harder to pump out the stereoscopic image, so it’s important to choose a powerful CPU/GPU combo if gaming is a priority.
The list below represents 3D laptops that run from midrange to high-end, with prices that start at about $1,000 and go to $2,000 or more (depending on your configuration).
[Philip Lelyveld comment: the article links to reviews of each laptop.]
Read the full story here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20111891-1/stereoscopic-shootout-rounding-up-the-latest-3d-laptops/