How is Tridef better than iZ3D?

[iondrive]

Hi all,

I don't really want to start any arguments, but I think we can discuss the differences between Tridef and iZ3D without any problems. Of course there will be differences of opinion but some facts will be undeniable. Like most comparisons, one thing is better in some ways and the other thing is better in other ways. Let me say in advance that my advice to people who can use them is that they should get both because if one doesn't work, then the other usually does or else one works better than the other for some particular game.

In general, this thread should be about how Tridef is better. If you want to know how iZ3D is better, there's a thread for that in the iZ3D tech support forum.

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=5875" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I put these threads under tech support because I see no better place for them and I expect the details to be technical. I'm willing to have them moved if Neil wants them somewhere else.

Let the comparisons begin.

[iondrive]

Hi all,

autofocus:
I think Tridef has a better autofocus function. Maybe I'll post some images to illustrate.

Cost:
Both cost the same except for iZ3D's various free outputs (anaglyph, iZ3D for iZ3D-monitor-owners, ATI DLP for some ATI-owners), but Tridef costs $50 for all outputs on a single computer and iZ3D costs $50 for each category of output mode even if it's on the same computer.

Higher framerates with Tridef:
I get slightly higher framerates (about 7% faster) when I compare both plain unenhanced interlaced modes, but I have a feeling that may differ depending on the game and system. Here's something interesting. I tested each driver with X-blades separately, then with both loaded at the same time. When I do that I can see that iZ3D and Tridef each report roughly the same framerate. I tried various combos and here's the data:

with both drivers loaded simultaneously in X-blades, I'm reporting framerates via iZ3D and Tridef:

frames per second: iZ3D / Tridef
both drivers active: 56 / 53-58
both drivers off: 100 / 91-106
iZ3D on, Tridef off: 84 / 80-90
Tridef on, iZ3D off: 83 / 80-90

Tridef's fps jumps around more but the average is about the same so I think you can trust each fps display to be equivalent.

This data says the drivers work the same but when I try them independently, I can get 107 fps from a scene with Tridef when I only get 100 fps from the same scene from iZ3D. Also it just seems like it's about 10 fps faster when I'm running around in the game but it's hard to tell sometimes so I'll stick to my 7% estimate. Maybe I'll ask the companies to provide an fps graphing function so I can see a graph of fps over time. I think I would like that.

The results for me were the same whether in Tridef's "Virtual 3D" mode or the normal 3d mode.


There's more to say but I think I'll leave things as they are for now. I'll post more as the opportunity and mood arises. Comments on all this are more than welcome of course.

--- iondrive ---

[iondrive]

3 more ways Tridef is better:

1) easier to import/export/share 3d game settings profiles

compare iZ3D: (basically cut/paste/edit an xml file)
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=5900" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and Tridef: (basically right-click and follow menus)
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=99&t=5926" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


2) soft-interlacing togglable in-game
iZ3D has "optimized interlacing" and Tridef has "soft interlacing" but with Tridef, you can toggle that on and off in-game and immediately see the effects. It's a nice little capability but, of course, not something critical.

3) scaled-up interlaced mode
I've mentioned this elsewhere but I think it warrants reposting here as well:

a little hint for people using interlaced-line-blanking on a CRT:
This driver has some great things about it including a way to get a better image on a CRT when using interlaced mode. Interlaced mode is normally ugly for reading text since every other line is missing from each eye but they've come up with a little trick that's on by default and what it is is a way to remap a lower res game onto a higher res display output. So if you set your game to 800x600, that's 600 horizontal lines generated by the game so normally each eye would see 300 lines of that, but if you set your desktop to 1600x1200 and then enable line-blanking, each eye sees 600 lines. Then start your game at 800x600 and the Tridef driver will take that res and remap it to 1600x1200 so that each eye now sees all 600 original lines generated by the game. Pretty slick, eh? Text is much easier to read and at that res, you don't see the interlacing except that it's darker than normal shutterglass viewing. The setting for this is called "force fullscreen resolution" and you find it in the Tridef in-game on-screen menu under "Window and Cursor". Also under that submenu is a "soft interlacing" option. Shut that off for crisper text.

The downside of upscaling:
I must add that at 1600x1200, your monitor will be more limited in what refresh rates it can handle. Mine can do 120Hz at 1024x768 but only 85Hz at 1600x1200. Also if I wanted to upscale a game from 1024x768 to 2048x1536 then my monitor can only do 60Hz. Of course you can try upscaling from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 and you still get some improvement.

iZ3D cannot do this kind of upscaling as of v1.10.
Also there's no loss in game framerate when you do this, at least when I tried it.

--- iondrive ---

[Ouais]

Hello,

I tested both iz3D and tridef drivers and with the iz3D drivers, I really cannot get the same (good) results as when using the tridef ones.
So, either I am a stupid user who cannot get the drivers working correctly and in this case tridef 1 -0 iz3D in that tridef is plug-and-play (more suitable to noobs),
Either they are limited and in this case tridef 1 -0 iz3D in that tridef ones are performing better.

In a few words, what I noticed on some games I tested with both drivers (NHL 2009, PES 2010, company of heroes):
- more 3D effect with tridef,
- better image quality (maybe due to point 3) with tridef,
- more drawbacks with iz3D (wrong separation on some objects, more ghosting, etc. Well the overall feeling is quite bad)

So overall, I would not recommend iz3D drivers (for non experienced users at least).
Maybe I am misusing the drivers, and in this case, some help would be welcome

Ouais

[iondrive]

Hi Ouais,

I sort of want people to believe that TriDef is better in some ways and iZ3D is better in other ways and so then avoid arguments about which one is "better". I think they're both great but of course one may be better for one person and the other may be better for another person depending on the games they want to play and their hardware setup. Anyway to get to your experience, if I had to guess as to why you feel better with TriDef, I'd say it's probably because of TriDef's often-good autofocus function along with their driver's ability to do gun detection and use zones to dampen the 3d effect of close objects like the gun in 1st-person shooters. I think that is a big help because it's no fun when your eyes go too cross-eyed when looking at the gun or the camera zooms in to your character's face. Do you usually leave auto-focus on?

I think I could like TriDef better if they had hotkeys for presets and had a good shutterglass mode I could use other than interlaced. (BLC preferred)

Normally I think of iZ3D as better for beginners since TriDef has kind of a steep learning curve regarding its on-screen menu system (which I love by the way), but if you just use the profiles from the Tridef Forum then you shouldn't need to do much tweaking yourself.

One more way Tridef is better: a head-tracking webcam feature!
I haven't tried this yet and I've heard it's not that great but at least they have it and I'm very pleased that they put it in there for us even if it still needs improvement.

Do you have some 3rd-person game where the camera is almost always at the same distance from the action. Those games don't need autofocus and so can play very well with 3d drivers in general. Examples: Marvel Ultimate Alliance, X-men Legends 2, Star-Trek DAC. What kind of 3D setup do you have?

C'ya

--- iondrive ---

[cybereality]

Maybe this was mentioned but the "Virtual 3D" mode is a nice feature. It allows for a subtle 3D experience with nearly no loss in performance from 2D. It also adds compatibility to games otherwise unsupported. For example, Crysis is playable with Very High settings using DDD in this mode. No other driver is able to handle Crysis too well (except for the Vuzix driver but that is VR920 only).

[iondrive]

Yeah,

I am glad that they included that option since it comes in handy sometimes, like with "Bard's Tale". Other ways didn't work well but it does so it's a good fallback option. I don't think there are alot of games with alot of humor in them. If you like bawdy humor and fantasy adventure games, you should try this one. For a sample of it's humor, see the website:

http://www.thebardstale.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Keep pointing at the lady and it takes you to a sexual harassment website.

=====

the webcam option:

I tried the webcam but it wasn't very good. Maybe it was just the laggy responsiveness of my webcam setup but I don't want to mess with it right now. I just get the feeling that this is one of those things that need everything to be setup just perfectly before it gets good. I also get the sense that things will progress only slowly with this tech so check back on this like every 3 years or so. Still, I'm glad they included it.

=====

Ouais,

I've thought some more about the issue of which driver does a better job at handling s3d and while I can come up with examples of game that work great with iZ3D, I think if you asked me to come up with some games that work better with iZ3D than TriDef, that might be a little difficult. Basically, if a game works with both drivers, TriDef usually does the better job. It's just that iZ3D has more outputs and preset hotkeys that make me favor it.

Also, I mentioned the game "Marvel Ultimate Alliance" and others but forgot to mention that if you get a "can't load output dll" error, then you might need to use a no-CD crack in order to get those games to work with iZ3D. Just watch out for viruses if you decide to try that.

--- iondrive ---

[cybereality]

Yeah, that webcam headtracking feature sounds great in theory but the implementation is very poor. I hope they fix it but somehow I get the feeling its not a priority. Still, I am glad they are experimenting with this stuff. It just needs some work.

[artox]

I have lately been testing games with iz3d and Tridef. The games which I've tried include Pop 2008, Pop:FS, Wolverine, Myst Online: URU Live, Flatout: UC, Oblivion, Hitman: Blood Money and Mirror's Edge.
It's interesting how the different drivers work. The fact that DDD's driver calculates stuff differently depending on the scene allows for much more depth. I haven't completely understood the differences between iz3d's and DDD's algorithms, so any explanations are welcome. What I did understand however is that with DDD you get different convergence multipliers for different objects, whereas with iz3d the multiplier is always the same. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, I have seen pros and cons in DDD's method. As I said, there is much more depth, but with added depth the objects in the back get less pop and distance between them is not that obvious. With Iz3d it is harder to get this much separation and not have the objects in the front split on you.
I'm sure I could really do a lot testing with the DDD OSD, but I sometimes don't like the effect I'm getting. An example is the gun focal point, I've tried it in oblivion, because with fixed 3 I kept getting a split weapon. What I achieved was a much reduced 3d effect and a converged weapon. I ended up using fixed 1, where I got depth and a converged weapon.
Overall I haven't really decided whether I want to sacrifice the object's pop-out with iz3d, for the depth with DDD, however with iz3d one truly cannot get in the scene as much as with DDD. The way I see it - with iz3d you get the objects in the game to have real sizes in relation to the game character (especially in 3rd person games), and with DDD you get the objects to have real sizes in relation to yourself (the viewer), which is more immersive if you don't have a 100" display. This is of course if you like having more separation (100). If you set it to 30 the effect would be far less pronounced than anything you can get with iz3d. Of course more separation means more ghosting.
In terms of performance and compatibility I do believe I get a smoother performance from DDD in particular scenes and less so in others, whereas with Iz3d the framerate is more consistent. I did, however get much more compatibility problems with DDD, especially when it comes to shaders. Hitman, Oblivion and Flatout get a 2d water shader and Flatout has a really buggy sky. Wolverine has wrong shadows (UT3 engine).
Flatout: UC, hovewer runs like a charm with DDD, which is not the case with IZ3d. Mirror's edge has shader bugs and most annoyingly a body bug, which leaves trails from Faiths limbs. To fix the trails one must make her body a 2d object, which frankly isn't very nice, so Iz3d is the preferred option, although DDD let's you experience a much larger scene. Myst Online: URU Live is my personal favorite for DDD, all menus and books are rendered in 2d, although deeper than they should be. I'll have to poke around in the osd to take care of this, but the 2d objects are a real relief from the constant profile changing necessary with iz3d. The mouse cursor, however is still double as in many other games since it is a 3d object.
To conclude, it is really hard to make a choice. I believe DDD is capable of much more, but what I would to know is how to get a way of producing the stereo the same way as with iz3d. I think it is possible, at least there is an option in the OSD, which makes the 3d not be dependent on the scene itself, meaning the closest and farthest object.
I'll post again when I can share any more insights.

[cybereality]

Also what I like about DDD is that you can tweak it to get nice depth in FPS games without having the gun insanely doubled. With IZ3D once you crank the separation up then the gun gets ridiculously doubled to the point it is not even possible to focus on it at all. On DDD you can get a nice image while still keeping the gun at a point that can be focused. This gives the overall image a tighter quality and is easier on the eyes. You can see this easy by testing Half-Life 2. However DDD does suffer from other issues in HL2 (namely that reflections on water are totally wrong and hurt your eyes). So it is a give and take.

[AntiCatalyst]

Also what I like about DDD is that you can tweak it to get nice depth in FPS games without having the gun insanely doubled. With IZ3D once you crank the separation up then the gun gets ridiculously doubled to the point it is not even possible to focus on it at all. On DDD you can get a nice image while still keeping the gun at a point that can be focused. This gives the overall image a tighter quality and is easier on the eyes. You can see this easy by testing Half-Life 2. However DDD does suffer from other issues in HL2 (namely that reflections on water are totally wrong and hurt your eyes). So it is a give and take.

Yeah, the gun tracking is really a must-have in FPS games. I tried turning it off for a while and it was just a mess. The gun was separated by at least 50cm on my 90" screen, and the only way I could remotely focus on it was the same way you focus on a cross-eye image; crossing your eyes deliberately and trying to line the images up. Didn't feel natural or immersive at all.
So, gun tracking is one GIANT point for the Tri-Def team.

I do like their menu system more as well, it's intuitive, easy to navigate through and you always see exactly what you're doing.


HL2 water reflections seem to be fixed by the way(at least in episode 2) in the ddd hl2 profile.. i've never stopped to analyze the reflections, but i set it to "reflect all", and i haven't seen anything out of the ordinary yet. So far, it's entirely artifact-free.
Had to disable the crosshair and hud_quickinfo though

[Dronpy]

I have both solutions as well and Tridef is definitely the better 3D experience. It has a much more stronger depth feeling and pop out of characters.