Nvidia drivers VS. iz3d - Performance

[hansschmucker]

Hi Everybody
I'm still experimenting with my new TriMon and I'm not exactly happy with the performance I'm getting.
The thing is: my PC is an old notebook with a 7900 Go GS. That's plenty for playing anything but the most recent games at a reasonable resolution.

But because the NVidia drivers won't work at anything but the highest resolution I'm having some issues when I enable 3d. The performance falls, depending on the game, by up to 80 percent compared to 2d at the same resolution. I was expecting a hit, but this is ridiculous.
Maybe I could get better performance with a newer driver, but sadly NVidia disabled support for the 7900 for the 180 driver series, so I'm stuck with 17-something on Windows 7

So how do the iz3d drivers perform under such circumstances? Any reports?

[Likay]

There's an easy way to find out:
Install iz3d-drivers and see for yourself.
Remember to disable nvidiastereo when running iz3d and vice versa. Others from that it just works fine having both installed at the same time.
Since the card is a tad older, don't expect wonder with newer games though.

[hansschmucker]

Just tried it again after you said that it should work. Turns out the optimized interlaced driver for iz3d somehow can't be loaded on my system, but the normal one works.

Performance-wise there's not a whole lot of difference. Running on the same NVidia driver version, the difference is close to zero with NVidia producing better output quality (looks to me like the NVidia driver was rendering two full resolution images and scaling them down, while the iz3D driver renders two half resolution images).
The big plus for the iz3D driver is that it works on any driver version, while the NVidia drivers only support my chipset (in 3D mode) up to some 180 series version. So with iz3D I can make use of the speed improvements in recent driver versions and they are really noticable: Sometimes you can get 50% more speed out of a 190 series driver.

The resolution issue sadly persists with both drivers: You need to display at full resolution or disable display adapter scaling. Wish I could play in 800*600 and scale it up, but apparently both are unable to move the image processing to after the output scaling stage.

And that, in combination with a driver bug on NVidia's 190 series sadly makes it impossible to use any of these drivers with that version. On series 190 drivers I cannot disable display scaling, so if I want to play a game that doesn't support 1680x1050 natively I'm totally out of luck. So I can't take the performance gains of series 190 no matter what I do, which eliminates the biggest improvement I'd get from the iz3D drivers.

The other thing is compatibility, which isn't perfect with either driver. NVidia's drivers produced better out-of-the-box results for me, but the lack of options to adjust stereo rendering is a serious problem. There's also a fair amount of games that crash with Nvidia's 3D support, but work fine with iz3D. And lastly, NVidia drivers appear to work only for fullscreen Direct3D games. If there's any GL support there, then I couldn't find it with Prey or Darkplaces.
The iz3D drivers on the other hand allow for much better configuration, but out of the box most games looked horrible on my setup. Sometimes I could fix it by adjusting the parameters, but not always.
Generally I'd say that the NVidia drivers produce better results IF they work, which they sadly do a lot less than when I was using iz3D.

So I'm going to stick with NVidia for now and keep the iz3D drivers in mind if there's something that doesn't work at all.

[cybereality]

Simple solution: buy a real computer.

[soundstorm]

3D settings are a very personal thing, I think. Some like it very pronounced as in -0.00001 conv. and 500% sep. and others with others setting.
On top of that the games don't render all in the same "proportions", so one game works good with setting x but another game will need different settings.

If there is a preset AND it is to your liking, good. If not, and thats for me almost 100% of the cases, I have to adjust it. It'll save forever, "problem" solved. IZ3D f.e. has a Default preset of -0.1 conv. and 30% sep. for games with no preset = very new games. So i almost everytime adjust the setting and im fine.

If you ask me, forget "out-of-the box" 3D settings for games... adjust to your liking! Lacking the possibility to adjust 3D setting would kill my 3D Experience... I want it my way...

[UndeadD3vi1]

186.35 supports your card...
http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/ ... -released/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

By "lack of options to adjust stereo rendering" on nVidia, do you mean you don't know how to adjust Convergence with the nVidia Driver? (The keys are disabled by default)

[hansschmucker]

186.35 supports your card...
http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/ ... -released/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

By "lack of options to adjust stereo rendering" on nVidia, do you mean you don't know how to adjust Convergence with the nVidia Driver? (The keys are disabled by default)

How the heck did you find out about that? I haven't tried them yet, because right now I'm pretty happy that 182 appears to work without the scaling bug, but I really had difficulties finding out about which driver version supported which chipsets in stereo mode.

About the keys. Thanks, I saw it but for some reasons the keys resetted themselves so I didn't get any reaction ingameso I simply assumed that they were not implemented yet (there's no UI feedback for these settings either).

Simple solution: buy a real computer.

My computer is real enough for me. But seriously, not everybody has enough time and money to have a second machine just for gaming.

[hansschmucker]

Just looked through the list of drivers I tried. One was 186.18 which wouldn't detect the TriMon and would only offer Anaglyph stereo as a result. I think I'll stick with my 182 for now.

[dreamingawake]

Simple solution: buy a real computer.

lol i like, and support that answer.

[hansschmucker]

As I said: not an option.

But for some reason it's not even an issue anymore. When I was testing iz3d I was using series 190 drivers which on my system give a great speedup for non-stereo gaming.

To get a better direct comparison I downgraded to series 180 again (since 190 series drivers don't allow for stereo with the 7900) and suddenly I got a huge speed increase with iz3D. I mean major. Like triple the framerate. Now I can play games Portal at 1680x1050 at about 15-25 fps, which is enough for now.