There are some hickups n currents drivers, but nothing I think of as too serious. The only bigger problem I had was a requiered reboot under Windows 7 when switching off the game 3D Vision mode to get the QBS mode working. Aside from this everything worked very well even for windowed QBS applications (aero glass swiched off automatically for this).
Yes, Quadro and 3D Vision work without the sync cable, but using it we experienced more precise syncing without the occational ‘flashes’. The cable is actually required when using something like 3D ready DLP tvs.
That’s how it is working today with Quadros and QBS and that’s exactly what I am asking for in consumer level drivers.
And that’s my point exactly. There is nothing to make “required core.” You can already ask for QBS. This is simply a matter of NVIDIA not providing QBS when they should.
I don’t think it’ll happen because of the Quadro line. Likewise for AMD because of their FireGL line.
It’s a tragedy in many respects, because stereo is having its moment in the sun, and it will be dismissed as a fad by consumers if this hack rubbish continues. Off-axis projection is necessary for comfortable and realistic stereo, and imperative for head tracking. Some of us know what it’s like to be immersed in a tracked stereo setup, and it really is in another league to the demos of the 3D Vision hacks I’ve seen.
Tracking is also getting its moment in the sun (nintendo/sony/microsoft all got tracking solutions), so I suppose it’s only a matter of time before the need for off-axis projection becomes obvious. Maybe then QBS will appear in d3d, and subsequently consumer OpenGL drivers.
It’s all very sad, anyway.
I do agree that both AMD/ATI and NVIDIA do now need to open up their quad-buffered API to the consumer level. Major companies like Panasonic and even Sony are putting some serious backbone into 3D technology.
I’ve done some research and the least expensive card I can find with QBS support is a Quadro 580, being a poor college student I’ll have to wait for a while before I can aquire this and play with my 3D monitor (iZ3D).
A side note, has anyone experimented with the iZ3D? My dev stations run Linux so I can’t really tell how the iZ3D drivers work with games like WoW, Unreal Tournament, and others that they claim to run in 3D.
when i asked a contact at nvidia if there were any plans to open the QBS API i got the ‘will never happen’ answer and i should look at cheaper Quadro cards. i could do so, but these cards would not be able to handle my applications in a monoscopic setup :p.
through my work at a VR group i exactly know how to do stereoscopic rendering right and my applications are ready, but most people working with them are not able to use these capabilities because a Quadro card with appropriate performance characteristics costs a fortune. extrapolating this to consumer software tells me, if no-one does the first step, this will eventually kill the PC as an entertainment platform for good and nvidia tries to push 3D Vision as a PC feature right now, so…
QBS on consumer cards… This would seriously breath life back to OpenGL.
On the other hand, it would eat into the sales of Quadro/FireGL and neither company would like that to happen. Still, the first company to do that would have a serious competitive advantage, so you never know.
thats what i am afraid of, till DX12 the 3D Vision approach (hack-stereo) will have a bad reputation for all the little to big things not working right. as i said every game i tried has serious issues (even if it is only a 2D crosshair). by that time the consoles may have the right APIs to get 3D working correctly and the PC is behind again.
regarding Stephans statement, having QBS available now (lets say by the GDC in march ;)) could have a great impact on OpenGL. i can only imagine how great this would be to some game (like Rage) on the PC.
by that time the consoles may have the right APIs to get 3D working correctly and the PC is behind again.
Consoles are used on TVs, which don’t usually have the refresh rate to do 3D imaging. Furthermore, what does it matter? If you’re banking on 3D imaging to somehow make PC gaming dominate console gaming, you should give it up now. It simply isn’t going to happen. And even if it could, OpenGL games certainly aren’t going to lead the charge.
then why bother with a better OpenGL API? not just for games or entertainment OpenGL is behind and what should lead the change to give OpenGL an egde over other APIs? so we give up…
games and entertainment are the biggest forces to drive stereo-3D, so clearly an QBS enabled AAA-game could help us to get a better suited API for other things.
There are some QBS games already, but none as of recent. Quake 3 (via ioquake3) and Doom 3.
Again, the iZ3D monitor ships with its own implementation via a driver, however I’m not sure how this kicks in for the applications that don’t have QBS, or what the driver does behind the scenes with the camera. Although I think it has its own SDK.
Guess I should probably install Windows on here and take a look at it all.
Consoles are also used on the HDTVs, for those with a very decent setup, although how would they get that to work? Is one HDMI port capable of sending two images across the line simultaneously? Do the consoles have enough power to handle double the render load?
So your metric for the success of the OpenGL API is that PC gaming beats console gaming in some fashion?
Sorry; I don’t see it as a competition. PC gaming is not opposed to console gaming. They both coexist so long as a player doesn’t marry himself to one platform or the other. If you’re a gamer, you should be interested in gaming wherever you may find it.
not just for games or entertainment OpenGL is behind and what should lead the change to give OpenGL an egde over other APIs?
Nothing. In any useful sense, the API war is over, and has been over for some time.
Game development takes a long time. A game developer that is using D3D is not going to build a new backend renderer just to access QBS. If they’re going to switch, they’d wait until their current game is released. By then, D3D would provide QBS.
Any advantage which OpenGL provides can be nullified in a single D3D revision. And D3D revisions tend to come quickly enough that game developers will not need to switch to OpenGL to gain access to the feature.
A sidenote: HDTVs are starting to include support for 120Hz refresh rate (real 120Hz, not fake interpolation techniques) and Bluray just finalized a standard for 3d playback. This is an emerging market and opening up QBS in OpenGL would provide some measure of competitive advantage until the next release of D3D.
It’s not really with shaders from what I’m experienced with, it’s more about the camera. You have to derive two positions and turn them slightly to a Zero Disparity Plane. Then write the lighting and visible geometry to a buffer (considered BACK_LEFT), and repeat the process for the BACK_RIGHT buffer with the other camera position.
If someone actually has done this in shaders though, I’d certainly be interested in looking underneath that engine hood.
[quote="M/\dm/
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with custom shaders in 3.x there is no way someone will be able to patch the engine on fly
[/quote]
I think Madman meant that the current Nvision hack-the-program-to-make-stereo-work is flawed for anything going away from fixed path, and this is true as shadows and other special effects all appear completely wrong with Nvision.
On the contrary, adapting the code of a program to work well with QBS is fairly simple compared to that.
(though, my VR920 adds to the immersion via head-tracking)