Turn off 2D for Nvidia drivers?

[chilledsanity]

I was told recently that drivers like Vuzix's and iz3d's use hooks that allow them to grab the 3D data and change the rendering that way. It turns out that a side effect of this method is that it only affects the 3D data, not the actual DirectDraw 2D text. This means that in most games your HUD will always stay flat and you can see it. This is definitely not the case with Nvidia's drivers. I often have to push the HUD off the screen in order to get good depth. Is there any way to disable it from using the 2D data with the stereoscopic drivers? Maybe some sort of registry setting?

[Tril]

That's not really true, as far as I know. Usually (games like Crysis and Bioshock), HUD are drawn using the usual direct3D rendering calls also used to render everything else. I think that NVIDIA does roughly the same thing as iZ3D, Vuzix, DDD, except that it only works on NVIDIA cards and maybe they use a different technique.

The basics of how to do a stereo driver is to make a game use modified shaders, modify shaders registers, intercept the Direct3D calls and modify them to support the hardware that you need to support.

From my understanding, there are mainly four ways to keep HUDs fixed while increasing separation. There might be more but I don't know them.

1.
Draw mono everything that has a Z coordinate under a certain value. You can probably try to do that in the NVIDIA driver by moving the frontplane. Before, this setting only worked on some games. Now, I think that it works in all the games.

2.
Draw mono everything that has a specific depth. You need to figure out what's the Z coordinate of all the elements of the HUDs for all the games you want to support. This requires games fixes specific for every game that you want to support so it's a lot of work to do. Once in a while, some geometry might be rendered at that exact depth too so it will be rendered mono instead of stereo for a fraction of second. In practice, I don't think it would happen too often. The Z coordinates must be too random to often hit a specific depth like 1.00000000 when the range is let's say from 0.00000000 to 8000.00000000.

3.
There are four functions used to render in Direct3D 9. Two of them take more processing power to use because you have to set the memory every time before using them. I'm not sure it's the exact explanation of that but it's close enough. These two functions are usually used to render small stuff without much polygons like HUDs. Everything else is drawn with the other two functions. If you know that, you can draw mono everything drawn by the first two functions I mentioned and you draw stereo everything that uses the other two functions.

4.
Draw mono everything that use a specific shader. This shader must not be used for anything that needs to be drawn stereo. If one of the shaders is used only when drawing the HUD, you can use that technique. However, I don't really think this happens a lot so you probably can't do that often. It's also a more game specific fix so it's harder to do.


To answer your question, I don't think there's much you can do apart from trying to move the frontplane. Everything else needs to come from NVIDIA developpers.

[chilledsanity]

Thanks for the advice. Maybe I've just tried it at the wrong time/ wrong games, but I can't remember EVER getting the front/back planes to do anything on the Nvidia drivers. I would press and hold down the hotkeys and nothing would happen. Do you have any games and driver versions you can confirm this works on? Also, I'm on XP, so the Vista ones aren't going to be any help to me I'm afraid. To date, the only thing I've ever been able to adjust with the Nvidia drivers is the screen depth, convergence, and Frustrum Cycle. It would be great if I could tweak more than that and get some more games working.

[Tril]

I just assumed they fixed it with the new Vista version. I thought you were on Vista and using the new drivers. I haven't tried the new NVIDIA driver because I don't have a Zalman monitor and I don't like using anaglyph so I'm not certain it works on Vista with the new drivers.

I think that the farplane and nearplane settings worked in Far Cry on the old Stereo drivers but I'm not sure it helped with the HUD.

On a side note, I never got Frustrum Cycle to work on the old XP stereo drivers. I never understood what it did. You're the first I've seen report that it works. What does it do?

[chilledsanity]

It's just a minor thing that adjusts the sides. So say if it renders past what's actually there you can add in black bars on the side or stretch the image so it doesn't look as messed up. Most games don't need it anyway. I don't know if it works on every game, but I know it works on UT2004 for me. And yeah I feel you on the Zalman thing. I'm running on shutter glasses and a CRT and from what I can tell so far, that's still the best S-3D experience short of a dual projector and maybe some HMD's.

EDIT:

Wow I got it working, I think I just never held the right keys down long enough in the right direction before. This makes a huge difference in functionality, thanks! Kind of makes me even more pissed Nvidia is dropping support for future versions!