ATi confirms support for 120Hz 3D displays coming soon

[BlackShark]

News spotted at Hardware.fr french forums.

ATi confirms that in it's future driver improvements it will provide support for sync with 120Hz 3D displays.
This will still require 3rd party software like the iZ3D driver and 3rd party USB emitters and glasses such as those provided by BitCauldron.
But ATi confirmed the rumors spread a month ago at the iZ3D forums.

Source (french)
http://www.hardware.fr/news/lire/05-01-2010/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Edit : an other article about Bit Cauldron glasses
http://in.sys-con.com/node/1235121" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Translation :

The news coming Catalyst!
Posted on 05/01/2010 at 11:56 by Marc
Print this news Send this news by e-mail


AMD has provided a paper giving some details on improvements that will be integrated in the coming months in the Catalyst drivers:

- Profiles by CrossFire X application will now be in a separate XML file that can be updated separately from the driver itself
- ATI CrossFire X with PowerPlay for Radeon 5x00: reduced consumption of additional cards
- Dual AMD Graphics: Possibility to combine the performance of the RS880 IGP with future GPU entry level and Cedar Park.
- Stereoscopic 3D: Update D3D driver to enable third parties such as iZ3D to use their 3D solution with 120 Hz screens Support glasses Bit Cauldron.
- Eyefinitiy: Bezel Management
- Increase the GPU acceleration in Windows 7 Video Converter
- Support for DisplayPort Audio (already in 9.12 Hotfix)
- If the manufacturer of the laptop allows the possibility of installing Catalyst on a laptop with Vista and 7
- Improved 2D performance in Linux
- Support for Ubuntu 9.10 and OpenSUSE 11.2

Here is a list of interesting in many aspects!

[Likay]

Cool!

[winlonghorn]

Still not quite what Nvidia offers now, but a great step forward nonetheless! Great news!

[Neil]

I moved this to the news wire. Great find!

Regards,
Neil

[DmitryKo]

Great, if true, I can now put the Acer GD245HQ monitor on my waiting list.
These are the news AMD should be publicizing at CES, not some stupid demo of 3rd party software and displays!
Hopefully other major glasses manufacturers will follow with similar USB or VESA-dongle emitters, since Bit Cauldron is not currently present on my home market.

PS. Never heard about the ZigBee standard before Do we really need an lower-cost alternative to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth?

[winlonghorn]

Great, if true, I can now put the Acer GD245HQ monitor on my waiting list.
These are the news AMD should be publicizing at CES, not some stupid demo of 3rd party software and displays!
Hopefully other major glasses manufacturers will follow with similar USB or VESA-dongle emitters, since Bit Cauldron is not currently present on my home market.

PS. Never heard about the ZigBee standard before Do we really need an lower-cost alternative to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth?

That is all well and good about the GD245HQ monitor if we could actually get information about it. I called their customer service and they told me to call the stores. The stores all said that it doesn't exist in their systems. Then I called acer back and they claim that they have no idea when it will be released.

[DmitryKo]

That is all well and good about the GD245HQ monitor if we could actually get information about it.

I'm certain the monitor will be there, it's backed by NVidia you know...

I'm far more concerned about these Bit Cauldron glasses, which "will be available from major household brand names in the second half of 2010"

[winlonghorn]

That is all well and good about the GD245HQ monitor if we could actually get information about it.

I'm certain the monitor will be there, it's backed by NVidia you know...

I'm far more concerned about these Bit Cauldron glasses, which "will be available from major household brand names in the second half of 2010"

Yes, I know that it is backed by nvidia. That is one of the reasons that I want it. lol Yeah, I am not sure about the glasses either. I have never heard of them before today.

[cybereality]

Who in the sam hill are Bit Cauldron? Good news anyhow though.

[budda]

Hi,

Does the ATI announcement of S3D support finally mean the possibility of :

EYEFINITY + S3D = PANORAMIC 3D


Looking forward to it.

[DmitryKo]

Who in the sam hill are Bit Cauldron?

I could care less as long as their glasses work, there isn't much choice anyway.

Does the ATI announcement of S3D support finally mean the possibility of EYEFINITY + S3D = PANORAMIC 3D

Sure, if you can afford six 120 Hz monitors at $500 each and dual Radeon HD5890 at $650 each, and would accept getting 10-15 fps in most modern games

[taz291819]

Small review of Bit Cauldron's glasses.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/01/05/ ... d-glasses/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[DmitryKo]

Aha, so they are the technology provider to OEMs, who will design and ship actual products to consumers - and what's cool, the technology is actually both cheaper and offer better quality than the competition! Seems like Nvidia will soon be paying dearly for their arrogant marketing decisions.

[cybereality]

Those glasses actually sound pretty good. I just hope some other companies get into the mix and start making some decent shutter glasses.

[taz291819]

Aha, so they are the technology provider to OEMs, who will design and ship actual products to consumers - and what's cool, the technology is actually both cheaper and offer better quality than the competition! Seems like Nvidia will soon be paying dearly for their arrogant marketing decisions.

Yep, even looking at the glasses on their website, they look to offer a lot more light throughput.

[Freke1]

Small review of Bit Cauldron's glasses.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/01/05/ ... d-glasses/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Reading the links on the right was a surprise! A 3D driver from ATI could be needed very soon. Though for many years they have chosen not to make one.

[pixel67]

I hope Nvidia is paying attention. A fully open ATI driver architecture that allows 3rd Party drivers to hook into them and support new displays is a game changer! Now ATI will be able to offer full 3D packages as well as Nvidia but also capitalize on the excellent drivers that both IZ3D and DDD supply. A great example is DLP Link (the technology packaged in the latest DLP projectors from Acer and Optoma). Nvidia doesn't support it because they have their own proprietary hardware, but ATI along with 3rd Party drivers could support this and more.

Nvidia needs to follow suit. Open up your base drivers so IZ3D and DDD can hook into them the same way. Change the S3D setup panel so the user just simply selects the type of display they have from a list rather than all of this autodetection nonsense that messed up all of us DLP users! People are smart enough to select their own display type... really!

Competition is a good thing for the consumer.

[winlonghorn]

Ok, now I am officially more confused than I was. Can somebody please help me to understand the best way to get full hd 3d for blu ray and everything? My budget is approx $800, so I am limited there too! The key idea here is that I want "Full HD (1080p) 3D".

Edit: Basically from what I gather here, Nvidia's solution is no longer viable. Am I correct in that assumption?

[dreamingawake]

Nvidia just announced today they will be supporting 3d across 3x displays or projectors..

This is utterly amazing. Bye bye Eyefinity..

http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/0 ... ology.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[winlonghorn]

Nvidia just announced today they will be supporting 3d across 3x displays or projectors..

This is utterly amazing. Bye bye Eyefinity..

http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/0 ... ology.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That is why the ATI stuff and the hype around it is confusing me lol. They have a lot of their own to announce tomorrow!

[DmitryKo]

A fully open ATI driver architecture that allows 3rd Party drivers to hook into them and support new displays is a game changer!

I don't think it's an implementation of an extensible "stereo output encoder" driver model, like I said here... probably just some driver callback to enable shutter glasses synchronization and not much more.

Nvidia just announced today they will be supporting 3d across 3x displays or projectors

... with a 3x performance drop? Thank you, please come back to us in 5 years

Reading the links on the right was a surprise!

What links?

Can somebody please help me to understand the best way to get full hd 3d for blu ray and everything? My budget is approx $800

To get 3D Blu-ray on a PC, you need a Blu-ray ROM drive ($150), Power DVD 10 Ultra ($100), and one of those stereo 3D monitors like iZ3D ($350), Samsung/Viewsonic/Acer 120 Hz plus compatible glasses ($300 + $150), or Zalman ($300) (Zalman and iZ3D are technically not "Full HD", but the difference is negligible)

To get stereo 3D gaming, you'll need a powerful 3D card such as Radeon HD5850 or Nvidia GT285 ($450) (Nvidia is a requirement for 3D Vision glasses).

[rajkosto]

i bet ati's thing is the same as nvidia's marked side by side frames, output 2 frames at once, let the display driver flip them around perfectly, also include a function pointer there so a function can be called when the pages flip, to notify the usb stick or whatever
you cant flip frames perfectly from outside the driver, especially when the driver takes more than 1/60hz to compute the actual frame

[DmitryKo]

i bet ati's thing is the same as nvidia's marked side by side

Nope, that's how a full-featured stereoscopic driver would work, and ATI currently has none.

Their solution would be to provide a way to notify 3rd-party software of the exact "hardware" video sync straight from the DVI/HDMI trasmitter, so they can pass it to USB emitter and glasses. Producing actual frame alternative stereo sequence is entirely up to 3rd party application and drivers.

[rajkosto]

it would be easy for ati to add page flipping based on 2 images, i didnt mean like "nvidia" to have a full driver, just the feature that allows software like stereoscopic movie player to work, aka passing a framebuffer 2x the size of a normal one, with a struct with presentation info embedded in the last line
a "full featured" stereoscopic driver takes 3d data and CREATES the views itself.

[Freke1]

What links?

The links:
1. Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference
2. Nvidia GT300 yields are under 2%
3. Nvidia kills GTX285, GTX275, GTX260, abandons the mid and high end market
on the right side of this page: http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/01/05/ ... d-glasses/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BlackShark]

Aaaaah i knew i had read the name "Charlie Demerjian" somewhere.

He's the former reporter from The Inquirer who got kicked out from an nvidia event and managed to get on the "nvidia banned list" of all nvidia events. Since that event he's taken his revenge by becoming a die-hard "anti everything made by nvidia".
Yes, he's very good at underlining every single little detail he doesn't like about nvidia.

He is isn't neutral, so his opinion is clearly biased, but he what he says if very often verified from other sources.

[winlonghorn]

A fully open ATI driver architecture that allows 3rd Party drivers to hook into them and support new displays is a game changer!

I don't think it's an implementation of an extensible "stereo output encoder" driver model, like I said here... probably just some driver callback to enable shutter glasses synchronization and not much more.

Nvidia just announced today they will be supporting 3d across 3x displays or projectors

... with a 3x performance drop? Thank you, please come back to us in 5 years

Reading the links on the right was a surprise!

What links?

Can somebody please help me to understand the best way to get full hd 3d for blu ray and everything? My budget is approx $800

To get 3D Blu-ray on a PC, you need a Blu-ray ROM drive ($150), Power DVD 10 Ultra ($100), and one of those stereo 3D monitors like iZ3D ($350), Samsung/Viewsonic/Acer 120 Hz plus compatible glasses ($300 + $150), or Zalman ($300) (Zalman and iZ3D are technically not "Full HD", but the difference is negligible)

To get stereo 3D gaming, you'll need a powerful 3D card such as Radeon HD5850 or Nvidia GT285 ($450) (Nvidia is a requirement for 3D Vision glasses).

I already know most of what you just told me. I have an Nvidia GTX 280, blu ray drive, core i7 cpu, 6GB of ram, 1 TB hard drive, and now I need the 3D Vision glasses, Acer 120hz monitor (1080p) and the PowerDVD 10 Ultra software. I was only concerned about the viability of it in the long run.

[ssiu]

To get 3D Blu-ray on a PC, you need a Blu-ray ROM drive ($150), Power DVD 10 Ultra ($100), and one of those stereo 3D monitors like iZ3D ($350), Samsung/Viewsonic/Acer 120 Hz plus compatible glasses ($300 + $150), or Zalman ($300) (Zalman and iZ3D are technically not "Full HD", but the difference is negligible)

The current 22" iZ3D monitor does not have HDCP, so it likely won't work with 3D Blu-Ray.

[DmitryKo]

the feature that allows software like stereoscopic movie player to work, aka passing a framebuffer 2x the size of a normal one, with a struct with presentation info embedded in the last line

Why bother with adding a special stereoscopic texture format if it would only work with certain 120 Hz solutions? Just have the application prepare sequential frames and provide a callback function for hardware L/R sync trigger.

The current 22" iZ3D monitor does not have HDCP, so it likely won't work with 3D Blu-Ray

Yep, HDCP is required in Windows Vista/7, see PowerDVD hardware requirements; Windows XP is unaffected though.

1. Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference
2. Nvidia GT300 yields are under 2%
3. Nvidia kills GTX285, GTX275, GTX260, abandons the mid and high end market

Check http://www.semiaccurate.com/category/humor/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[rajkosto]

can someone actually confirm that iz3d does not have HDCP ? since the panel driver chips are specifically the HDCP 1.1 ones instead of the cheaper ones which do not have HDCP

[DmitryKo]

the panel driver chips are specifically the HDCP 1.1

It's about stereo transmission method which uses both DVI and analog VGA connections. HD content in Vista/7 can only be played back through HDCP encoded digital connections, and analog VGA and YCbCr outputs can be disabled or downsampled, this is enforced at the driver level.

[rajkosto]

if you use dual dvi for iz3d of course, not VGA, i was saying that the controller chips, both of them, in the iz3d, are the HDCP 1.1 versions and they fully support HDCP encryption over the DVI link. Is there any tool that could verify if the graphics card is outputting in HDCP mode ?

[ssiu]

can someone actually confirm that iz3d does not have HDCP ? since the panel driver chips are specifically the HDCP 1.1 ones instead of the cheaper ones which do not have HDCP

see this thread: http://forum.iz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=150 (BlackQ is an iZ3D executive, so it counts as official answer)

[rajkosto]

well thats stupid
purchase hdcp capable chips then forcefully disable hdcp in their firmware...

[dreamingawake]

DmitryKo;

Uhm, what ? Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you actually know what you're doing when it comes to
configuring pc hardware and software you can play in uber high res. in 3d no problem. Don't give
me this crap about the cards not being strong enough. Yes, some settings may need to be lowered
such as Shader Quality, or AA, however most older games will be fine I'd say with a minimum GTX 280.
We have not even saturated the bus width of most of the high end cards. So, as soon as Nvidia
releases it I'll be playing in 3d, and in 5 years from now I'll explain to you how to get your holographic
3d display working.

[DmitryKo]

Uhm, what ? Sorry to burst your bubble

Uhm, babble? It's only arithmetics - for 3x the resolution in stereo, you get 6x less performance, and probably even worse due to various side effects. Most modern games will choke at 2560x1600 on the GTX280, even without stereo and antialiasing, and 2560x1600 requires approximately 3 times less bandwidth than stereoscopic 3D on a 5760 x 1080 display. So don't tell me tales how a GTX280 would be able to perform stereo 5760x1080 in a modern game.


Here are some benchmarks at 2560x1600 for you (divide by 3 to get the approximate fps figures for 3-way 1920x1080 stereo).

Modern games, tested in Dec 2009; GTX 285, Core i7 920 (quad core, 2666 MHz)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Clear Sky - 37.4 (no AA), 11.2 (AA 4x AF 16x)
Far Cry 2 - 50.5, 40.4
World In Conflict - 47.0, 31.0
CRYSIS - 13.9, 13.2
CRYSIS WARHEAD - 12.2, 11.4
Company Of Heroes Opposing Fronts - 67.9, 54.6
Lost Planet Colonies Edition - 39.8, 28.7


"Older" games", tested in Dec 2006; Core 2 Extreme X6800 (dual core, 2930 MHz), 8800GTX SLI (roughly equivalent to GTX 280/285)
Far Cry (No HDR) - 152.8 (no AA), 149.2 (AA 4x AF 16x)
Far Cry (HDR) - 111.6, 106.0
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (No HDR) - 133.1, 100.5
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (HDR) - 113.5, 86.0
Call Of Juarez - 28.6, 27.3
PREY - 128.9, 89.8
Company Of Heroes - 103.2, 66.8
F.E.A.R. - 133.0, 86.0
Serious Sam II (No HDR) - 159.8, 97.2
Serious Sam II (HDR) - 157.0, 94.1

[rajkosto]

wait for FERMI and get 2 of them in SLI (which will probably underperform and be expensive and hot as hell)

[DmitryKo]

Well, neither GTX 285 SLI nor Radeon HD5970 fares much better in these tests (check the links). I'll give you an update when they test production Fermi boards.

[rajkosto]

you are forgetting that 3x more resolution does not necessarily mean 3x less framerate, these arent raytracers we are using...
i guess that if the game is extremely fillrate limited, then the framerate really will be 3x less, but anything other than pixel shaders wont be operating on 3x more data.
3d does make the framerate preety much halve because every shader has to be ran twice

[cybereality]

You guys have got to be smoking something if you think triple-head stereo gaming isn't going to take a *HUGE* performance hit. We are probably talking about 1/5th the frame rate of a single 2D screen. So if 30FPS is a baseline for acceptable performance in 3D you would need to be getting 250FPS in 2D single screen to get even borderline acceptable performance in triple-head 3D. 250FPS. Maybe you can hit that in Half-Life 2, you can forget anything more modern than that.

Not to mention that triple-head 3D is a waste. There is no stereo-overlap in your peripheral vision. Its sounds cool, but in practice it would add very little for being in stereo. Check out the diagram below and look at the shaded area in the center. Thats all you could see in 3D.

TripleHead_3D.jpg