Perhaps the Holy grail of Gaming, and indeed entertainment.. true to life 3D..
its Emulated on a 2d medium about as good as it can be at this point, the only remaining step is to have the image itself JUMP OUT .. IMAX on your home.. smell that? yea its 3 week old leather underwear.. that 109 was close.. ok that has no correlation to this whatsoever.. maybe i shouldent drink before writing a review next time.. oh well, ive typed this much.. so Im gonna ride it till the wheels fall off.
I was curious about 3d Glasses every since the first came out, but there have always been glaring limitations that have pushed me away..
and of course there are the medical concerns.. I have astigmatism, what will happen to me? I dont want my fiancee coming home to find her worse half laying in a pool of vomit and feces, weraring garish headphones and a set of glasses that will insure that from this point foreward, even in the afterlife.. I will never again, get laid.
Ok so finally I decided to give it a try, after reading a few handfulls of reviews from the likes of SimHQ, Flightsim.com and others, I purchases a set of wireless 3d glasses from eD.. Full price including the "Im an impatient bastard" shipping came to a total of $116
Upon arriving.. it looked grim the instruction manual was.. vague to say the least, but it contained one nugget of info that caught my eye.. and that was a section regarding Nvidia cards.. and LCD monitors..
this is probably a good time to state the specs of the "test system"
RELEVENT INFO:
BFG Geforce 7900GT Overclocked
Athlon 64 4000+
2GB XMS ram
19" Samsing 906BW 2MS LCD Monitor
thats all that really important..
Well installing it was easy.. just a dongle that goes in-line with with your monitor, and an infared transmitter that turns the glasses off.. (not on, you have to use a button to turn them on.. go figure)
after hooking up everything and putting on the glasses, I had to take a look in the mirror.. sure enough.. even my hand was turned off..
I installed the latest Nvidia drivers and Stereo drivers, fired it up and.. nothing.. well not "nothing" a blurry mess.. not 3d.. just a flickering blurry icon holocaust that was once my desktop..
I monkeyed with settings, installed different drivers for a while.. then decided.. to save time, I'll just shoot eD an e-mail.. im obviousley doing something wrong.. Im still waiting on the reply from that e-mail (6 days ago)
Well, desparation took me to the Guru3D forums, which has a DEDICATED section for 3D glasses.. in which I quickly found the answer to my problem.. the answer being.. there is none..
apparently, there is no real way to get the glasses to work properly with an LCD monitor if your Using a GeForce card..
You wouldent guess this from reading about these glasses on the eD site where its only refrence to LCD monitors is:
Now supporting both CRT and LCD monitors![/i]
Well.. thats true.. if you dont have an Nvidia Card, which..which is reasonable I guess, I mean who has Nvidia cards, only, probably more than half of all gamers is all.
at this point just for chuckled, I brought a 17" CRT home from work and hooked it up.. and it worked.. the 3d test patterns showed in 3d and it looked pretty darn cool..
HELL YES!!! time for ACES HIGH!!!
now, it is important to know.. that typically on the test machine AH is run at 1440x900x32 with 2X FSAA and 2X Antistropic filtering, with all detail settings on HIGH (in video card options)..
frame rate under this settings is usually solid at 60FPS (according to the game) which is the refresh rate of the monitor.. so it could be much higher
get enough planes in the sky over a big field with enough smoke and ack firing.. and you may see move from 60 to low 50s.
firing up AH in glorious 3d yielded me... 9 FPS in the tower.. 11 on the runway..
thats correct.
I dont know if its a driver compatability issue.. or what but turning on 3D dropped performace roughly 80%.. best I can guess.. rendering the game unplayable..
by this point..(3 days after getting the glasses) the bubble had popped, I was done.. not worth the effort..
sooo.. REFUND, yes? well.. so far.. NO.. I filled out the eD
RMA REQUEST FORM but so far i have recieved the same reply as I did from the support e-mail. NONE..
the glasses are boxed up and sitting here waiting to go out..
So in conclusion..
true 3D is coming.. but it DAMN SURE ISN'T HERE YET!!!
and when it does arrive, get it from someone other than eD.
