The 1080p 24Hz 3D mode works just fine here too, however the performance the game can provide in that mode is a bit low as at times the framerate drops below 20 fps at some moments. Here the 1080p 24Hz 3D mode works just fine, but the game is unplayable with vsync enabled, disabling it however improves the situation a lot and as you can see from the video above with over 100 fps average the game is using both GPUs at maximum with them being loaded at over 95%. The game itself is not so demanding anyway, so the GPU load was quite low here.
This is one of the games that I could not make the 1080p 24Hz 3D mode work as the game tries to force 60Hz refresh rate by default, however there were no problems to play it in 720p 60Hz 3D mode. Bad Company 2 is quite a demanding game even when not played in stereo 3D mode, so with maximum details and no AA and HBAO disabled I’ve managed to get just an average of 35 fps with about 55% load on both GPUs. The 1080p 24Hz 3D mode worked just fine here too, but the game is playable only with vsync disabled. So definitely some performance optimizations can help get the user better experience from the game. The problem however turned out to be the average framerate I was getting from the game which was around 30 fps (per eye) at 1080p mode with maximum details with both GPUs loaded to just about 48%. The game Avatar works without problems in 1080p 24Hz 3D mode and can be played pretty comfortable even with Vsync enabled, although you better disable it for a bit better experience. But now lets take a look at each of the twenty games I’ve tested with and see some of the specifics for each title, I do plan to try out some more games, but as it is a quite time consuming task it will take some time.
Another thing that needs to be worked on a bit is the optimization for 3DTV Play to utilize the graphic processors with their full potential, especially in multi-GPU configurations as stereo 3D at high resolution can be quite demanding and getting a good average framerate ensures the good experience. You can also see some of the other minor issues I’ve encountered with pretty much only the problem with Darksiders being more serious and thus preventing the game to be played in stereo 3D mode. In the video it might not be that noticeable, but with vsync enabled the game is pretty much unplayable and disabling the vsync makes with more comfortable to be played at that mode, provided that you can get high enough average fps. Here on the video you can see how the difference looks when playing a game in the 1080p 24Hz 3D mode with vsync enabled and disabled with Bioshock 2 used as an example. So below you can see what were my findings… And another thing I was interested in was if they worked in the 1080p 24Hz 3D mode were they comfortably playable in that mode that is originally designed for 3D movies and not for games. My goal was to find if the games work in the 1080p 24Hz 3D mode, so I’ve started with that, before also trying them out in 720p 60Hz 3D mode. All of the 20 recent games I’ve tried were set to maximum details with no AA by default, although I’ve also tried them with anti-aliasing if they had available in the game options, just to be sure, but the fps results mentioned below are with no AA.
The test system I’ve used is with two GeForce GTX 480 video cards running in SLI (no problems with dual GPUs here), under Window 7 Pro 64-bit and with the latest drivers version 260.99 in order to ensure most up to date functionality and the best possible performance. And since I did not have trouble making things work with 3DTV Play, I’ve moved to testing with games and as expected I’ve seen a few mostly minor issues that need to be fixed by Nvidia in order for the 3D HDTV support to be further improved.
After finally managing to get the AMD HD3D Technology working with the Panasonic 3D HDTV I’ve moved to testing the 3DTV Play functionality from Nvidia, which did not have any trouble working with the 3D TV and making it work was just a simple matter of plugging in the TV to the PC… hopefully AMD will work that out too in the near future to make things work as simple as that and resolve all the issues they have, including providing support for Crossfire configuration with multiple GPUs.