Nvidia GeForce 3DVision & How 3D Works

Gaming Performance

This is the important one then for most people. As ordained tinkerers and fiddlers (Um…?! - Ed) we don’t mind what we have to do with our gadgets as long as they eventually work the way they are supposed to. It’s why we don’t complain too much when we have to patch our favourite games.

Luckily though, the 3DVision presents itself as not requiring a huge amount of effort to get it working and that’s mostly true. It has a compatibility list of about 300+ titles that it claims it can work with – though we raised an eyebrow when we noticed that a handful of the games on the list are actually ranked as ‘Not Recommended’.

Still, we were very happy to see that the list of supported games spans back over a good length of time and includes some notable PC classics, not just the latest ten games to be released. System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Half-Life – all of these make the cut and rank alongside Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and Left 4 Dead.


To take this backwards compatibility into account we wanted to test the 3DVision on a breadth of games, sending Joe home to raid his games library while our Steam accounts grabbed a slew of the latest and debatably greatest games. All in all we end up with a total of 14 titles.

They were…*Deep breath*: Psychonauts, Left 4 Dead, No One Lives Forever, House of the Dead 2, Half-Life: Source (and The Hidden Source Mod, Team Fortress 2, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, GTA 4, Quake 2 (and indie game Gravity Bone, based on the Q2 engine), Escape from Monkey Island, Deus Ex, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Audiosurf. That’s a lorra, lorra game.

There were issues a’plenty though; it has to be said – though not all of them were Nvidia’s fault. Some of the games we tried (Monkey Island, House of the Dead 2) stubbornly refused to work on a current Vista system despite our best efforts. Others, like Quake 2 and the Gravity Bone mod just didn’t have an option to go to the required native resolution and thus we couldn't get them compatible with the 3DVision.


Most of the games did work right off the bat though, especially the more recent ones. The Source engine in particular is exceedingly compatible with stereoscopic gaming.

The effect of stereoscopic gaming however probably needs a bit more describing to avoid getting your hopes too high. If you think that donning a pair of three-dee specs and hooking up an IR sensor to your PC is going to make the game a visually surrounding experience with enemies climbing out of your screen to get you then you’re sadly mistaken. That type of effect can only be achieved with high-level hallucinogens.

What the stereoscopic software does do though is give the game some proper depth. It feels more like the scene is recessing into the screen than climbing out of it, with polygon edges sharpening to make models look actually tangible. When the system works well you’ll think you can reach out and shake hands with Left 4 Dead’s Bill, or gently caress Lara Croft’s…guns.