While it's mostly true that games require no special effort on the dev's part to work with products like nVidia's 3d Vision, there are a couple of common exceptions: fog / gas effects and aiming rectiles (crosshairs). Both are often implemented using 2d short cuts for performance reasons.

The fog / gas short-cut can be implemented as an alpha filter over an flat surface (because in 2d you can't see the difference. Play a few tricks with the alpha channel so that the edges have a higher transparency than the center, and your brain will interpret the whole as having a cloud like volume). In 3d, it looks flat (like somebody is doing a light show against the wall).

Aiming rectiles are the worst though. They are often a 2d sprite / part of the HUD. When viewed in 3d it becomes the nearest thing to you and its kind of difficult to aim when the crosshairs appear to be behind the gun you are pointing . VATS to the rescue!

I'd love the devs to do the relatively trivial work of making the aiming recticle 3d. I'm worried the iron sights feature of FNV will be unusable in 3d without it.

The hype around 3d is over the top, but I'm pro-3d. And I'm more pro-3d for games than films (if you're watching a film (a) you have to look at the focus depth the director expects (this isn't true for games) and (B) if you're still thinking about 3d 15 mins into the film, I'm guessing the film isn't very good).

Disclaimers:
I don't actually own a nVidia 3d vision system. I have used the eDimension system which is the basically the same system (shutter glasses). With the arrivial of 120Hz LCD monitors, I've been looking into it again. While I write code for a living, nobody has ever paid me to write a graphics driver. And if they have any sense they never will

why dont they just shove a ripper in our hearts? lol i sure hope not.

It makes me laugh when I see people complaining about stuff like this. Guys, if 3D would appear in New Vegas, it would be an option. Which means; you don't have to play in 3D if you don't want to. So enough moping around like the new 3D rage is the end of the world.

so your saying liberty prime in 3d wouldn't be epic?

I honestly can't wait to see 3d games. I got a 3d 45inch tv for my birthday from my cousins. Were planing to buy each other the tvs because it is easier for each of us to put in a couple of bucks for each other then to actually buy it.

but more on topic 3d is a bit over rated and until we get a Resident evil game or some other thriller to utilate the 3d images then we won't really see much 3d action.

GAHHHH!! I just want to tear someone's head off. "Step Up" in 3d? REALLY?????

3d for a movie that didn't require a [censored] sequel let a lone a first [censored] movie. I want to burn every 3d piece of equipment right down to the guy operating said piece of equipment. 3d was fun for like the first five minutes in 1955. ENOUGH ALREADY!!

No more 3d movies, no 3d tvs, no 3d games. STOP!!

If you want 3d look around you. That is about as 3d as you are going to get.

Sorry, way off topic I know.

Buuzzzkillll....

I don't know about that fog shortcut, most of what I've seen looks pretty good (especially the dust motes in some holoprojected buttons in Borderlands, one of the more astounding things I've seen). About the crosshair though, 3D Vision has its own 3D crosshair that you can toggle on/off. It's just a red circle that renders at the depth of whatever you're aiming at. It's perfectly functional, but clashes sometimes - it goes great with Mirror's Edge, looks OK in Fallout, but is totally out of place in Oblivion.

I would like to see a developer spend some time making a fully 3D HUD though. You see holographic displays in movies like Avatar, and its particularly impressive because they're something that doesn't exist in real life, but they look about as real as possible. A HUD that didn't just look like it was projected on a flat piece of glass, that maybe curved a bit and had elements that projected forward from the screen, would be some pretty amazing eye candy.

Iron sights won't look right, I'm guessing. When you hold a gun in real life, you line the sights up with one eye or the other, and either close or ignore the other eye. If Bethesda doesn't make any special accommodations for 3D users though, the gun will render as if it's dead center between both eyes, and the sights won't line up for either. You'll have to use the 3D crosshair.

Hopefully not, then they have to worry about to sets of graphics, plus gameplay. Thats just too overwhelming for them. I'm tired of hearing about 3D anyway, the hype will die when people start to get mind blowing migraines.

Agreed, agreed, and agreed.

It was a gimmick in '55.

In 2010, it's a high-tech more-refined gimmick, but nonetheless a gimmick still.

Nothing could make Liberty Prime epic. Maybe proper pacing...


I have never had a single headache from watching 3D movies. I haven't had so much as dry eyes. Your response will almost certainly be "movies are only 2 hours long" to which I would respond that I often watch two movies when I go (hey I paid for gas, nothing to do anyway, might as well watch another...).

OP, you must have been thinking of PS3 as Microsoft has no (known) plans to implement 3D into their games. Regardless, New Vegas will not support 3D outside of unofficial 3D computers.

EDIT: Sorry for double post. The browser lied to me and said I exceded the post per minute limit.

i love falout 3's and oblivions grafics too they were amazing to me at least

We'll have to see. The type of 3-D being done on TVs, PCs, and consoles (stereoscopic shutter 3-D) has been around for a long time. I had a video card that could do it 10 years ago, and the Sega Master System had a (slightly less convincing) version of it in the '80s. It never really caught on, and they keep bringing it back again every once in a while to see if it will. Old CRT TVs and monitors could handle the refresh needed to do it way back then because they have naturally high refresh rates...it's actually a bit more difficult to do with digital displays because they're not designed to refresh that often. That's why you need a 120Hz monitor to pull it off on a PC unless you have an older CRT monitor...LCD displays don't need/aren't designed to refresh that quickly, so many of them don't refresh fast enough for the shutter effect.

Anyway, if it catches on this time you might be right. If it doesn't, in the near future you'll be saying, "hey, remember when they were doing that 3-D stuff for a while...whatever happened to that?" I've already seen it come and go at least twice in the past 20 years. It isn't new...it's kinda cyclical.


Oh, it's official all right. The data needed to apply the stereoscopic "flicker" effect is already there in the geometry data sent to the video driver. All the driver has to do is render two slightly different frames for each eye instead of the one it would normally render. The image then flickers between the two at a certain frequency. This is the reason it's hard to do on current consoles. Twice as many frames need to be rendered, so the game needs to be heavily optimized for it to avoid killing framerates. Developers are already pushing the console hardware to its limits, so it's not so easy to achieve the visual detail that people expect at the doubled framerate required for the 3-D shutter effect.

They have given me multiple headaches. Oh, and movies are only 2 hours long.

Wow, never thought so many would be against a relatively simple feature...
I have an nVidia 3D Vision kit, and Fallout 3 worked quite well in 3D. I kinda hoped the devs would take the time to fix the few glitches here and there so we could have a perfect experience (remember, they are already doing everything in 3D, it simply then renders to 2D on the screen).
Dragon Age & its extension were great in 3D, I found it really added to the immersion... Cliché, but it gave more "depth".

Anyway, only a slight improvement on the 3D Vision side would be a great plus to me.

i hate all this 3D crap it doesnt add anything of value to any game, why waste the time on something that most people wont use when the devs could spent more time on just making the game better, and i wish they would call it something else, because games are 3D already....

Exactly, games are 3D already, and it simply takes relatively little effort (depending on the engine I'm sure, but since F3 was worked pretty good...) to make them work well with 3D Vision. And that DOES make the game better, for me at least.

I don't get why people react that way, most of us see the world around us in 3D, and having graphics and sound get closer to reality is almost always considered positive. As I said, I tried some game where it works well, and I doubt you tried every existing game out there.

"Most people won't use" is right though, but of course the less games are optimized, the less people will be interested. But that's certainly more nVidia's problem than Obsidian's.

On regards to 3D - I don't want molerats leaping in my face and eating it.

Its just another gimmick like motion controllers-silly gaming industry trying to lure in new crowds of casual gamers. :rolleyes:

what is in the game that could make 3D usable, just the beginning part where the courior gets a bullet. and that would cause the devs to have to make the red go down the screen like a bond movie

To clarify, yes, some 3D effects certainly are distracting / unnecessary / gimmicky.
I just like games that work in 3D with everything like the 2D version, nothing added except depth.

more like 30 min migrain suport, because that was my experince with Fallout 3 in 3D

Honestly for most games I dont see the point of waising Developmen cycles on making it look good in 3D

They were showing it off in 3D at the nVidia boot at Quakecon. It was neat at first, but I couldn't stand it for more than 10 minutes. It made my eyes feel crossed, and the Pipboy was hard to use in 3D. The Pipboy would look like it's sticking out of the screen, but the mouse cursor wasn't rendered in 3D, so you see two mouse cursor that appear like they're behind the Pipboy. I had to close one eye just to be able to click the buttons on the Pipboy.

I noticed that when I turned the 3D off, the game actually looked better. The 3D does something to the colors, they appeared dark/dull/faded with 3D on.