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Nvidia’s three-screen 3D Vision system

Posted by By Robert Dow and Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: nvidia graphics gaming

To do more you gotta see more—it’s the law

As you all know (and if you don’t we’re going to send you to your room and make you write it a hundred times), Peddie’s 2nd law is—The more you can see the more you can do.

And as you may know we’re pretty big fans of stereo games (S3D.) And, some of you may have seen at CES, or GDC, or PAX, or Computex, Nvidia’s three-screen S3D system. You could see it, but you couldn’t touch it—it wasn’t really a shipping product yet. Last week Nvidia officially released their GeForce Beta v258.69 drivers which add support for 3D Vision Surround (S3D) and Nvidia Surround (2D view across three monitors).

So that puppy is shipping now and if you can get in front of one, make sure your seat belt is fastened. Oh, and if you’ve got 5.1 sound check that it’s turned up. This experience simply put is freakin awesome.

Nvidia dropped by last week and set us up with a test system As configured, the system was pre-loaded with Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium:

• Black OPS Assassin Edition Chassis.
• Digital Storm Certified (Dual/Triple/Quad SLI Compatible) 1000W PSU.
• EVGA X58 FTW3 Edition 3X SLI (Intel X58 Chipset) motherboard.
• 6GB of 1600 MHz DDR3.
• Intel Corei7 960 processor (4-core @ 3.2GHz with 3.9GHz Turbo capability).
• Two eVGA Fermi GFX 480 1.5GB AIBs.
• 120-GB OCZ SSD (System Drive / OS installed here).
• 1.5TB HDD (Storage Drive), 7200 RPM.
• Multi record DVD.
• Blu-ray drive.
• eVGA X58 sound card.
• Three, 23-inch 1920x1080 120Hz Acer GD235 monitors.
• Nvidia 3D Vision kit.

The system is amazingly quiet, very impressive looking with green lights inside to show off the plumbing which includes a massive passive LCS cooling heat sink for the CPU, and two 6-inch whisper quiet SilverStone fans on the bottom of the case.

The three monitors, with the left and right canted approximately 30-degrees outward, stretched five feet wide.

OK, now what?

We ran the system is widescreen (5760 x 1080) SLI S3D on and with S3D turned off. We also ran it on one monitor with SLI on and off.

The results for comparing S3D on and off across three monitors are shown in the Figure 3.

The average difference was an expected 50.9% which is totally reasonable and understandable given the huge workload and number of pixels that are being calculated. And although 12 FPS (in “Aliens vs. Predator”) wouldn’t be acceptable in game play, that can be improved by turning a few things down—we ran all the tests at max or extreme. We did see some ghosting in the Unigine benchmark when running in S3D mode, and it seemed it may be tunable.

We then ran a series of tests using just one monitor with S3D off.

The test results show very nice scaling and the impact of stereo and anti-aliasing on a single and dual-SLI AIB system. In a single monitor system, with stereo turned off, and using a single AIB, adding a second AIB in SLI give you a 77% increase in FPS, and it’s the same if 4XAA is turned on. In stereo on a single monitor with AA off and a single AIB you’d have a marginal experience at 25FPS, going to a dual SLI configuration gives you a gain of 54% and gives you 38.4 FPS, which is acceptable. With 4XAA the gain is 68% from a miserable 18.4 FPS to a tolerable 30.9 FPS.

We also ran the single monitor tests using “Stalker.”

Playing games in 3D Vision Surround is an immersive experience across the three screens, and fully exploits Nvidia’s technology: GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs, 3D Vision, and SLI. You may have previously experienced 3D, but you have never seen 3D like this. It’s one of those things that you need to see to believe!

As good as this system is it must be pointed out that Nvidia’s 3D Vision Surround will work on GTX 400 class as well as higher end GT200 class GPUs. In the next issue of Tech Watch we’ll show test results of the new GTX 460 running in S3D mode.