ELSA delivered drivers with the Riva128 (ELSA Victory Erazor) and after they filed for bankruptcy NVidia supported the glasses further.
Latest driver is 91.31 for 2K/XP and support upto GF7 series, so GF7950GX2 f.e.

I recommend at least a setting of 100 Hz, better 140 Hz.
It works very well with games as Unreal, UT, UT2004, Worms 3D and so on.

You might need 15 min to 2h to get used to the 3D effect and it is quite stressful in the beginning. Though for the time it was released it was very amazing, just think how late current 3D TVs / monitors appeared. You could have had this already 1997...

I just tested it a bit with Forceware 78.01 and the corresponding 3D stereo driver on my older XP machine. (I'm generally using older versions because the GeForce 6800 Ultra starts losing performance and even features past a certain point, roughly when NVIDIA changed their control panel.) That's all I needed; didn't even need to bother with the extra bundled X3D software!

While there is some ghosting (at 1024x768 120 Hz; 140 Hz fares slightly better), the effect indeed works. However, game compatibility is varied. Unreal Tournament had some serious hall-of-mirrors problems, though I was using the Direct3D9 renderer. realMYST fared better for the 3D parts, but it's also a game that heavily relies on a 2D cursor for interaction.

I still have some tweaking to do here before I'm totally comfortable.

And as for the sudden resurgence of 3D shutterglasses, I chalk that up to LCDs finally catching up to what CRTs could do for refresh rates a decade ago. (Even then, you have to put up with the other deficiencies of TN panels...)

Maybe some additional comments:
For a cursor for a fps try disabling the crosshair in the game itself and use the centered 3d crosshair from the nvidia driver (setup in the 3d stereo control box).

For newer games I remember the driver having sometimes problems with shaders appearing only at one eye. So better try always first a DX7 renderer if available. It is also a bit problematic since older games are not programmed with any real 3D compatibility in mind. Maybe try some NVIdia tech demos as Creature or X-Isle for GF2.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

And as for the sudden resurgence of 3D shutterglasses, I chalk that up to LCDs finally catching up to what CRTs could do for refresh rates a decade ago. (Even then, you have to put up with the other deficiencies of TN panels...)

I think it's the other way around, LCD refresh rates increased because 3D movies and shutterglasses started to gain popularity. You can even buy 800Hz TVs now! I haven't seen these myself but I wonder how LCD technology, that already has a hard time doing 60Hz, could show 800Hz video without any ghosting or response time issues... Plus there's not a movie or TV channel in the world that uses these insane refresh rates. Sounds a bit like marketing bullshit to me, just like with 2000:1 contrast ratios or 500W audio amplifiers.

Personally I don't like shutter glasses, they have slow response times like LCD screens and tint everything dark green. And like LCDs, closed shutter glasses are never 100% black.
The last 3D movie I've seen was Tintin, with polarised glasses. These preserve colours much better but still have a bit of a dark tint to them. Also in fast moving scenes I noticed the movement wasn't all that smooth, but that would probably improve with higher framerates.
My favorite stereo viewing method is cross-eyed, that way colours and sharpness is preserved perfectly and there's no need for extreme refresh rates. The downside is that you can't move your head around a lot and your eyes get tired very quickly, especially when using this method for gaming. And you'll need a dual-head setup or a very large widescreen monitor to be able to see something.

For older games that work with the nVidia stereo driver, I know Rune works very well and maybe other Unreal-based games too, but only with the default slow and ugly DX7 renderer.

If you can find a way to manually activate the glasses, you can get it to work with modern 3D drivers like Tridef and iZ3D. I do this with my old H3D glasses. Maybe the activator will work for yours?

That activator you linked seems to work on my flagship computer running Windows 7 64-bit in that it'll start and stop the glasses flickering, so that's one obstacle out of the way.

Unfortunately, these glasses still aren't playing nice with either NVIDIA 3D Vision or iZ3D. This is going to take quite a bit of work to get these working on a modern computer.

Have you tried all the 3D modes in the activator like Interleaved and Over/Under? I dont think these will work with 3D Vision, but theres settings in them for iZ3D/Tridef.

For iZ3D the setting is called Side by Side, and then set it to Over/Under. You're going to want to remember the hotkeys for turning the glasses on/off, because Over/Under will make it hard to use windows. Dont have to worry about that for Interleaved, which is what the setting is called in iZ3D.

I just left it at Interleaved, admittedly. I was thinking that was what they meant by alternating left/right eye frames, instead of, say, interlacing the frames together.

I'll experiment a bit more with the various settings on both the activator and iZ3D ends, and see where that gets us.

EDIT: Victory! I got it working with iZ3D, but the activator has to be set on "Page Flip" while iZ3D is set to "iZ3D Shutter". Works like a charm, once you get everything adjusted.

However, the game compatibility list is a bit smaller than expected...I wonder if there's a way to force it to run on games that aren't in the list already.

It should work with any game regardless of the compatibility list. The issue is the DirectX version the game uses, because i think iZ3D only works with 8 and 9. Tridef works with 9/10/11. They both have no OpenGL support.

You can get a few opengl games like Quake 3 to work with this wrapper which will convert OpenGL>D3D. Just put the DLL in the game's directory and it will work. Just remember the wrapper's compatibility isnt great.

jwt27 wrote:

I think it's the other way around, LCD refresh rates increased because 3D movies and shutterglasses started to gain popularity. You can even buy 800Hz TVs now! I haven't seen these myself but I wonder how LCD technology, that already has a hard time doing 60Hz, could show 800Hz video without any ghosting or response time issues... Plus there's not a movie or TV channel in the world that uses these insane refresh rates. Sounds a bit like marketing bullshit to me, just like with 2000:1 contrast ratios or 500W audio amplifiers.

I wonder what sort of current video system has enough bandwidth and power to send 800 full HD frames per second without dying in a fire. And what would be the gain of such ridiculous rates. Other than reproducing real CRT flicker for retro pixel shaders in emulators, that is 😉

My 3d vision is apparently kinda wonky, and none of those glasses-based methods have ever really worked on my brain, so about that I couldn't say much.

What I'd really like to see is some actual innovation in display technology beyond LCD/LED/AMOLED. The flexibility and color quality of CRTs is still(!) missing from those.... too bad SED/FED never took off.

I have a Panasonic Viera plasma - it can do 800Hz sub-fields, but is not a 800Hz frame display. Newer models are anything up to 2000Hz, but it's all to do with the motion compensation between the actual transmitted frames (ie to get rid of the jumpiness when you're watching sports on an LCD panel, for example). They're still nominally only 50/60/100/120Hz displays (depending on input source).

megatron-uk wrote:

I have a Panasonic Viera plasma - it can do 800Hz sub-fields, but is not a 800Hz frame display. Newer models are anything up to 2000Hz, but it's all to do with the motion compensation between the actual transmitted frames (ie to get rid of the jumpiness when you're watching sports on an LCD panel, for example). They're still nominally only 50/60/100/120Hz displays (depending on input source).

Was just about to say something like that.

It's the old 50,000:1 contrast ratio, except this time it's not so much bullshit, as much as it's just a bit misleading for the uninitiated.

tgod wrote:

It should work with any game regardless of the compatibility list. The issue is the DirectX version the game uses, because i think iZ3D only works with 8 and 9. Tridef works with 9/10/11. They both have no OpenGL support.

You can get a few opengl games like Quake 3 to work with this wrapper which will convert OpenGL>D3D. Just put the DLL in the game's directory and it will work. Just remember the wrapper's compatibility isnt great.

That explains why it didn't work for Unreal Tournament 1999; I was using the D3D10 renderer. Too bad about the lack of OpenGL support both ways...though I recall even the old ELSA Revelator drivers from back in the day also having issues with OpenGL initially.

As for iZ3D (still haven't tried Tridef yet), I've noticed that regardless of whatever you set the in-game resolution to, it will always use your desktop resolution. (I'm guessing this is so that it plays nicely with modern LCDs.) Contrast the old NVIDIA 3D Stereo drivers, which would basically use the game's set resolution. Needless to say, I want to drop down resolutions for higher refresh rates' sake (and also easing the load on my old 8800 GT now that it has to basically render each frame twice).

Now, if both of these didn't cost money for the mode I need to use...Tridef seems to have the edge in support with DX10/11, but they also cost more. When it comes to $30/50 for drivers, it gets rather tempting to just put that toward some NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses on eBay and just use that implementation. (It has more support in general, like being the only one to support YouTube HTML5 3D playback and so forth.)

If you get Over/Under working, compared to the other modes it has one advantage because it uses a sync doubler. For instance, if you're running at 60hz, it will be doubled to 120hz with Over/Under enabled. Theres some info about it here. For some reason I was able to get higher resolutions/refresh rates to work with this mode compared to page flipping.

Is there something special about HTML5 3D? Because the 3D videos on youtube support interleaved too, so they work with the glasses. If you're worried about cost, it looks like iZ3D might become free/open source in a month, just check out the homepage.

I tried interleaved mode with iZ3D and the activator. No dice. Over/under mode didn't work either. Page-flipping mode was the only one I could get to work.

Just tried Tridef, and strangely enough, I CAN'T get page-flipping to work in that one at all, yet interlaced mode works. Works like a treat in their own media player and YouTube. (On the other hand, I actually noticed the activator's interlacing mode working properly this time. Maybe I need to give iZ3D another shot.)

Games, on the other hand, can be hit-and-miss, and they have to be launched through Tridef Ignition for 3D to kick in. iZ3D, on the other hand, doesn't mind if you just launch them directly, nor did NVIDIA's old 3D Stereo driver from the XP days.

This will take a bit of work to find a solution I'm comfortable with, and preferably without having to switch up my desktop resolution all the time (because that causes windows to shrink).

Also, how will I know if the VGA passthrough adapter that came with these glasses has a sync doubler at all? I tried to use over/under mode with the activator, but the hotkey shortcuts didn't work in-game, and I just ended up blind on the Windows desktop (black screen).

If turning on Over/Under is giving you a black screen, that usually means your monitor doesnt support whatever resolution/refresh rate you're using. Using the hot key to turn it off should give you picture back though. Make sure you're not allready running at like 120hz, because this would sync double to 240hz, which i doubt your display supports. Try 60hz/lowering the resolution.

You can see which resolutions/refresh rates it supports just by turning it off/on in windows. What you gotta do is turn Over/Under on before you launch the game. Have you noticed those patterns on the top of the screen when you turn the glasses on/off? If a game is blocking these it wont work. You should see half of your desktop in each eye if its working properly.

Usually, I get the "Out of sync" message, but not that time. Still, the hint was useful enough that I dropped the refresh rate to 60 Hz. Even 75 Hz did the trick, since that equated to 150 Hz and the FD Trinitron G1 chassis takes up to 160 Hz.

However, there's a serious issue with Over/Under other than randomly getting out-of-synced because of the doubled refresh rate, and that's the fact that both frames are vertically offset, with no obvious method to correct that. I'll stick to Interlaced mode for now, since it's generally less fiddly than most of the other options in terms of workable resolution settings without compromising my desktop resolution or my visibility, half resolution for each eye be damned.

SquallStrife wrote:

megatron-uk wrote:

I have a Panasonic Viera plasma - it can do 800Hz sub-fields, but is not a 800Hz frame display. Newer models are anything up to 2000Hz, but it's all to do with the motion compensation between the actual transmitted frames (ie to get rid of the jumpiness when you're watching sports on an LCD panel, for example). They're still nominally only 50/60/100/120Hz displays (depending on input source).

Was just about to say something like that.

It's the old 50,000:1 contrast ratio, except this time it's not so much bullshit, as much as it's just a bit misleading for the uninitiated.

So it IS bullshit, if this number has nothing to do with the refresh rate.

It's been a few months, but I finally figured out how to get these old glasses working with NVIDIA 3D Vision.

As it turns out, the 3D Vision emitter emulator wasn't set up quite right. I must have missed a step about copying 3d_x64.dll to \Program Files\DSF\GenericHID\ and using it to replace the SoftHidReceiver.dll there. After that, the 3D Vision emitter drivers should install on the virtual device, if they're not too recent, and then you can go through the NVIDIA 3D setup without issue.

(Unfortunately, 285.62 is the last version with "Generic CRT Mode", meaning later driver versions will probably force me to edit a "driver" for my monitor that has a 3D Vision-certified monitor branding, but has modelines more suitable to my actual monitor.)

Another thing that threw me for a loop at first was that unlike iZ3D and Tridef, stereo 3D is not enabled by default whenever you start a game. You have to manually toggle it on, but after you do, it looks pretty nice.

I couldn't get HTML5 YouTube 3D playback to work, but I can still use interlaced mode with a quick change to the E-D.exe settings. Also, OpenGL games seem to be entirely out of the question for whatever reason; it's Direct3D-only.

In other news, iZ3D is no longer being supported, so I can't recommend it any more. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it went open-source, either.