I did not test it myself but i read on the iZ3D forums that the latest version of stereoscopic player does support iZ3D monitors natively
http://forum.iz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1500
http://forum.iz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=2066

Nvidia 3D vision support is performed through the nvidia driver, as expected.


This is the issue of content, not technical ability to generate and display stereo3D images.
AMD considers that it is up to the developers to implement Stereo3D engine in their games. Which unfortunately is the best way to do it and the ultimate goal that we gamers should support.
Accessorly it also is the absolute only way to be 100% legal : in france, a Hollywood studio got sued and lost the trial for colorizing and selling a Black&White movie against the will of it's director, the very same thing can happen to stereo3D conversion.


It makes absolutely no sense commercially speaking for AMD to invest any money at all in making their own brand shutter glass since the big TV industry decided to invade the market in 2010. AMD would loose much much more money that it could potentially gain.
Thay's better follow the trend and support already existing hardware rather than creating their own.... which is exactly what they are doing.
So far nvidia is the only 3D glasses manufacturer to use this technology (dumb 120Hz monitor, sync by the computer). All others always use a direct sync between the display and the shutter glasses.
So what you are saying here is "I want to use the nvidia Geforce 3D vision glasses" on an ATI GPU. Well yes that would be great but since AMD does not want to invest in the Mono-3D to Stereo-3D game conversion drivers against nvidia, but prefer to support 3rd party developers (like iZ3D and DDD). So you should not expect AMD to do it.
iZ3D has already spread a few rumors about a possible future support of the nvidia glasses on ATi GPUs only.

What AMD will do for sure is support the hdmi 1.4 norm (just like nvidia will do) since it seems to be the standard that next year's consumer 3DTVs will be using and provide a standard way for developers to access the hdmi 1.4 features through the display driver (it may be an AMD api or a standard windows api but it will be easy for AMD to implement).
What we do not know it whether the 3D features of hdmi 1.4 can be achieved through firmware update of current hdmi 1.3 GPUs or if it will require new GPUs...

Sorry for getting in the middle, but i think that what Dmitry says is that you could change the word 'AMD' in this article by any other brand name as AMD is just providing generic PC hardware.

That's true. AMD/ATI claims to provide the best gaming experience in the world, yet all they can show on a stereoscopy promotion event are some third party solutions for video decoding? AMD is going to lose their hard-won customers because of this attitude.

It's rather an issue of development budgets. Avatar is a big game project based on a blockbuster movie - a stereoscopic 3D movie, mind you - by a highly-regarded film director which became a hit before even being released, so it is budgeted accordingly and can afford reimplementing the wheel. And Invincible Tiger is just another console game which had no other choice but to reimplement the wheel, since there is noone else to provide the stereo support.

I'm not convinced that implementing stereoscopy at the engine level is the best possible way; it does give the developers full creative control, but it's not future proof, since any new output device will have to be explicitly supported by the application, which means older applicaions will never be updated to support newer hardware. I still remember the days of DOS gaming with a Gravis UltraSound card, and I wouldn't want to return to a programming model where applications are left on their own with either multiple proprietary APIs for each piece of hardware or very generic middleware APIs which does not expose every unique feature of the device.

A plausible goal is to have a standard driver model for encoding stereo ouput to the display device, and the ultimate goal is to implement stereo features at the core level of the graphics API and in the display driver interface. That would be the most compatible and future-proof solution.

Sorry, I don't see them following anything in a useful manner, the way AMD is marketing their "support" for iZ3D is unconvicing at best.

I do not urge AMD to enter LCD monitor business or shutter glasses business, but they could at least team with 3rd parties and endorse their 120 Hz solutions, like Nvidia are doing with Samsung and Viewsonic (and Zalman).

What about providing a standard VESA stereo connector on an external bracket, or arranging with some monitor maker to include a standard VESA stereo connector in their 120 Hz monitors, like they do it in 120 Hz 3DTVs? AMD do not have to promote their own shutter glasses, they have no incentive to withdraw support for 3rd party emitters and glasses (unlike nVidia), and many 3rd party emitters do feature VESA stereo connector.

It does require sligthly more effort than just showing you some pre-rendered stereoscopic content which anyone else is capable of showing as well.

That's because there were no mass produced 120 Hz digital displays until recently, and many 3rd party glasses were mostly designed with CRT monitors in mind, that's why they use analog VGA for sync. When there are more 120 HZ Full HD LCD displays which use either dual-link DVI or DisplayPort, I'd imagine 3rd parties would soon be following suit by introducing DVI, DisplayPort or USB emitters. Either that, or AMD could just endorse the VESA standard stereo connector, as I said above.

There are no new features in HDMI version 1.4 which are relevant for PC users, and most features of HDMI are just higher-level data link and transport protocols etc., all implemented in software/firmware.

Come on, how relevant is in-cable Ethernet which requires you to replace your $50-per-piece HDMI cables and your $200 video card? What a joke, a $10 100BASE-TX hub and a pair of $2 UTP cables would do the same. HDMI 1.3 at least doubled the bandwidth of the physical layer.

Just thought of a way to make VGA pass-through glasses work with 120 Hz LCD monitors.

Activate the clone mode on a secondary VGA or DVI-A output, choose a generic monitor driver and set the video mode to 800x600 @120 Hz (availabe on any modern AMD or Nvidia card), and attach the VGA pass-trough to this output.

No termination is required as far as I know, but I'm not so sure that the sync will be perfect between two outputs, and even if the sync is OK, this would only work in Vista and Windows 7, since XP and 2000 do not have a built-in clone mode.

theres clone mode in every video driver, even if its not shown in display manager in windows
and yes, as people who test input lag have demonstrated, its not perfectly in sync with the original display
also, what would it do ? not EVERY 2nd frame is meant for the other eye, especially if theres some stall somewhere if framerate is below the wanted one.

best way would be to make extended desktop to a 640x480 composite output, then output pure white or pure black to it (depending on which shutter should be closed), that way you could determine which eye you need by the average voltage level on the composite output... black would have a much lower average voltage than white, however this wouldnt work perfectly on ati cards because they have the occasional desynchronisation in dual head mode.

actually its even better to use vga rather than composite, since then you have a pure red/green/blue wire, that will be at maximum voltage when the frame is white, and at minumim when the frame is black. could do the same thing with DVI as well, if you could set up some transistors to figure out the differential voltage on the red or green or blue differential pair.

Well, now that AMD finally woke up to support 3rd party USB emitters, it's all only theory.

those glasses wont be coming untill Q2 2010
i really would like for iz3d to let us write output mode plugins , then i could try crazy stuff like that