How do I adjust convergence/backplane etc in game?

Discussion of legacy stereoscopic 3D gaming hardware and software (e.g. NVIDIA XP stereoscopic 3D drivers).
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SonicIce
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How do I adjust convergence/backplane etc in game?

Post by SonicIce »

In the nVida .pdf file it lists all of these hotkeys you can use in-game to adjust various factors.
http://jord.nm.ru/stereokeys.png" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I press these keys but nothing happens. How do I adjust it?
Thanks. :wink:
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Damo3000
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Re: How do I adjust convergence/backplane etc in game?

Post by Damo3000 »

Check the nvidia control panel, under stereoscopic settings, look for keyboard shortcuts, make sure to enable "enhanced in game settings"
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iondrive
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Re: How do I adjust convergence/backplane etc in game?

Post by iondrive »

hi guys,

Well it's been over a year so I guess it's time to respond to this for anyone else who might need this info in the future.

Checkbox label:
"enhanced in game settings" may be for new-school nvidia, old-school drivers have a checkbox labeled "Enable In-Game Configuration" under the hotkey configuration popup window.


How to tell if your keystrokes are having an effect...

StereoOSDEnable:
Lots of times it looks like you're hitting the right keys but nothing is happening. Here's one way to tell if something is happening or not but be warned that this might crash your computer. It works fine for me under 162.50/162.50 on a 7800GTX with winXP-32bit in single core mode (single core mode is important here). Go to the windows registry by running "regedit" and make a StereoOSDEnable dword in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\Stereo3D]. Set it to "1" and run the nvidia 3d logo test. Adjust some settings with Ctl-F3/Ctl-F4 for Separation and Ctl-F5/Ctl-F6 for Convergence and you will see a little window popup in the top left corner. The window represents a side-view of the 3d world where the horizontal axis is labeled "z" for distance into the scene and the vertical axis is just "y" for height. There are some blobs that are supposed to represent objects in the 3d world but don't rely on them too much especially if HW-TnL is off (Hardware Transform and Lighting). Their position in this window is often not accurate. With this OSD enabled, you can see whether or not your hotkeys actually are being registered and are doing something. This setting also helps you see what your current gamma is if you adjust gamma with Ctl-G/Alt-G.

Convergence:
Besides just checking that your keystrokes are working, you can tell which way to adjust convergence by looking at the little arrow next to the number on top. Convergence adjustments show up as a purple line labeled "S" for "Screenplane". This is the crossover point or plane of zero parallax. Increasing convergence moves the screenplane to the left. If the screenplane line is out of view to the left or right, then you see an arrow showing you in which direction it is. You should be able to get it to show up in the window by using your noodle with the info I've mentioned. This is a "normal" 3d interlaced view but don't view it in s3d since it's exaggerated to make it easier to see the crossover point as well as effects of frontplane and backplane. Notice that the background is 3d and the little logo in the bottom left corner is also 3d. This will be different after we adjust the front/backplanes to show how they work. You would not normally want to 2d-ify the background.
nvsttest-normal.png

Frontplane and Backplane:
Other hotkeys are labeled "screendepth" (frontplane) and "backplane" and are used to 2d-ify the HUD when the HUD is 3d and you want it to be 2d. These are pretty out-of-date controls and normally only work with HW-TnL off which can cause your game to not render right, but you might use them someday with very old games or rare games like AvP-Classic-2000 (updated to use DX9). If you want to see how they work, disable HW-TnL under "Stereo Compatibility Settings" in the nvidia desktop control panel and run the nvidia 3d logo test twice since it won't work the first time. Even though these hotkeys don't show up in the control panel for stereo driver 162.50, they still work if you want to check them out. Frontplane is increased/decreased with Ctl-F10/Ctl-F9 and Backplane is increased/decreased with Alt-F10/Alt-F9. These controls popup the window with numbers and arrows like convergence does except that the backplane controls are reversed for some reason... increasing backplane moves the backplane line (labeled "R" for rearplane?) to the right instead of left like convergence and frontplane. Restated, increasing frontplane moves the frontplane away from you and increasing the backplane moves the backplane towards you. It's confusing, I know. Anyway, what these planes do is define a plane that makes things render as 2d on one side of it. 3d things in front of the frontplane become 2d and things behind the backplane become 2d. The backplane is less useful as you can guess but some games do have HUD elements out near infinity. You can also guess that if you push the frontplane too far in, then the whole scene becomes 2d and likewise for the backplane if you pull it too far out. If you're playing a game and you see things in the distance popping to 2d as they get further away, you may have a bad backplane setting. You can also make a scene entirely 2d by making the two planes overlap. To beat a dead horse, you could have an external view of a car in a racing game (chase-cam) and set the frontplane so that the rear half of the car is 2d and the front half is stereo-3d. Here's what it looks like when you use both frontplane and backplane to 2d-ify parts of the nvidia 3d logo test. On the popup window, the frontplane is labeled "F" and the backplane is labeled "R". Both lines are green and here, frontplane is on the left. "You" are on the far left and infinity is on the far right.
nvsttest-too-close.png

You see that the background is 2d. That is the effect of the backplane. You also see that the little logo in the bottom left corner is 2d. That is the effect of the frontplane or "screendepth" control. You can change the hotkeys used by changing values in the registry if you know the right registry settings to change. One side effect of fixing the HUD by using the screendepth/frontplane controls is that things in the world may come too close and cross that plane and become 2d like in the next image. This is not always a bad thing. One idea is to set the frontplane to be the same as the screenplane. This way things in the distance coming toward you will converge to screendepth (2d) and then not popout. By the way, iZ3D has something like a frontplane function but you need to know the vertex shader's CRC.
nvsttest-planes.png

Here are the registry settings for nvsttest if you want to see this for yourself. "RHWGreaterAtScreen" is for the frontplane and "RHWLessAtScreen" is for the backplane.

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\Stereo3D\GameConfigs\nvsttest]
"StereoConvergence"=dword:43b6c0f8
"RHWGreaterAtScreen"=dword:3bd86f40
"RHWLessAtScreen"=dword:3ab0ca0e

Alright, that's enough for me.

C'ya

--- iondrive ---

PS: Does StereoOSDEnable work with 3d-vision? What about front/backplane controls?

When HW-TnL is enabled like normal, the hotkeys don't even make the window pop up so you know it's not working. Remember to run some 3d app at least twice when you re-enable HW-TnL for it to work.

It turns out that screenshots are saved as png files when you use interlaced mode whereas normally they would be jps files. I guess that makes sense since jpegs are lossy and would combine some image data between adjacent lines during compression.
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