Meant to be Seen

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2012 1:49 am**

space123321 wrote:I have been trying to get Nvidia 3dtv to work as well (as I already have 3d vision). Tridef is working great.

Turns out my graphics card will not support 3dtv as I have 2 9800 GTX's running...

Why no support? I have a 5-series SLI setup working just fine, have they dropped SLI support for older series?

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2012 1:50 am**

WiredEarp wrote:I thought it was stated somewhere it supported 3D Vision - maybe I misread it and that was just a reference to it needing the 3D Vision dongle.

@ CyberVillain: Pierreye just said that 3D Play is FOC if you have 3D Vision... or do you not have 3D Vision already?

Nope, I do not have 3D vision, but I paid 600 dollars for my GFX card

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:38 pm**

@Frogztar

What is the setup to get stereo 3D on the HMZ working with an AMD card?

I'm tentatively in the market for a new graphics card, so I'm wondering: AMD or Nvidia?

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2012 2:26 pm**

CyberVillain wrote:
space123321 wrote:I have been trying to get Nvidia 3dtv to work as well (as I already have 3d vision). Tridef is working great.

Turns out my graphics card will not support 3dtv as I have 2 9800 GTX's running...
Why no support? I have a 5-series SLI setup working just fine, have they dropped SLI support for older series?

9800's aren't supported for 3DTV Play because they can't support the necessary HDMI signal to pass out frame packed formats.
If NVidia ever decided to support SBS or TAB I guess they could work.

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2012 5:31 pm**

love2scoot wrote:So if we’re talking about compatibility we should have a table that clarifies where we stand with our current knowledge. This is by no means comprehensive, so I’m hoping for some collaboration on this.

720p 2D @ 60Hz
Source: Various computers and HD Compatible Consumer Electronics

1080p 2D @ 60Hz
Source: Various computers and HD Compatible Consumer Electronics

720p 3D @ 60Hz Frame Packing (full resolution)
Source: Most all computers / consumer electronics with 3D output.
Examples: PS3, AMD HD3D compliant hardware, nVidia 3DPlay Hardware

1080p 3D @ 24Hz Frame Packing (full resolution)
Source: Most all computers / consumer electronics with 3D output.
Examples: PS3 / BluRay Players, AMD HD3D compliant hardware, nVidia 3DPlay Hardware

1080p 3D @ 30Hz Top and Bottom (full resolution)
Source: Limited computer products / consumer electronics
Examples: AMD HD3D compliant hardware with Catalyst 12.1 or greater

1080p 3D @ 60Hz Side by Side (half resolution)
Source: Several computer products / consumer electronics
Examples: YouTube Videos (when played through compatible hardware), Satellite HDTV signals

Unknown:
Support for lower resolutions / refresh rates
Support for scaled video at resolutions other than 720p
Support for 1080i

Btw brantlew, I found this link that addresses some of your earlier questions:
http://www.best-3dtvs.com/what-is-full-hd-3d-fhd3d/

How do these compare to the HMZ?

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2012 8:30 pm**

FingerFlinger wrote:@Frogztar

What is the setup to get stereo 3D on the HMZ working with an AMD card?

I'm tentatively in the market for a new graphics card, so I'm wondering: AMD or Nvidia?

I'm not sure for the HMZ specifically, but I'd say it would come down to the 3D format supported by both the graphics card and the HMD. I chose AMD for their eyefinity tech and the fact that they support framepacking and HDTV formats without any add-ons. The downside is that they do not support hardware PhysX and the majority of games are designed specifically for Nvidia cards.

The format should be supported on both, but I would recommend the iZ3D drivers or DDD drivers in addition to the regular AMD or Nvidia drivers as each game works a little differently and one driver might work better for one game vs another.

Posted: **Sat Mar 17, 2012 1:10 am**

For gaming, I would recommend Nvidia due to 3D Vision and new breakthrough from Helix directx 9 wrapper. Basically the custom directx dll would intercept the call so that end user can use the debug dll to dump out the vertex and pixel shader to fix the 3D incompatibility issue. Skyrim is perfect after the fix and Mass Effect 3 is playable in 3D (still had some issue with the fog).

Posted: **Sat Mar 17, 2012 1:12 am**

Hopefully, this will be compatible with PC and I'll use with the ST1080 to get a bit of freedom:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/22/xbou ... u-kill-th/

Posted: **Sat Mar 17, 2012 9:46 am**

Thanks for the info guys. I think I'll stick with my 8800GT for now and see how much trouble it has. (I imagine it will chug quite a bit on Skyrim w/ stereo)

Posted: **Thu Mar 29, 2012 9:17 am**

New blog post from SMD: more 3D formats supported.
http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/1/po ... t1080.html

Posted: **Thu Mar 29, 2012 9:43 am**

Cool, great to have clarification on all of this. I wish they supported a more "VGA-friendly" set of 2D resolutions, but what they have is still good. Another interesting tidbit from the responses is that more formats may be introduced through firmware updates or possibly a swap-out of the controller. So maybe at some point they will include a resolution scaler without you having to drop another $800 on an entirely new unit

Posted: **Thu Mar 29, 2012 4:42 pm**

So where I live the cable company uses 720p 3D Top/Bottom for ESPN 3D. Would the ST1080's 720p(Half Resolution) Top/Bottom mode work with the ESPN-3D Top/Bottom format ? Think this might be a wait and see type of question but if someone knows please post.

Posted: **Sat Mar 31, 2012 11:28 am**

@3dvison: Yes, the ST1080 will work for television as it supports both top/bottom and side-by-side half-res formats.

Posted: **Sat Mar 31, 2012 3:13 pm**

cybereality wrote:@3dvison: Yes, the ST1080 will work for television as it supports both top/bottom and side-by-side half-res formats.

Thanks cybereality,
I just don't know all the in's and out's of all the different 3D formats and the "Half Resolution" in the description, is what got me wondering about compatibilaty and if there were other types of top/bottom the cable companey might be using.
Thanks for the help cy.

Posted: **Sat Mar 31, 2012 6:00 pm**

@3dvison: Technically the term is "frame-compatible" which basically means they squish to views into one standard size video frame (usually at 720P or 1080P). This is also called by the name "half-res" or side-by-side (SBS) and top/bottom, over/under. The ST1080 should support all of these.

Posted: **Sun Apr 01, 2012 5:19 pm**

So the St1080 is like a Sony PS3, in that they both have HDMI 1.4 3D features added to what is really a HDMI 1.3 device.
If it has what you need, what does it matter. I think the cable company only uses HDMI 1.3 also.

Posted: **Sun Apr 22, 2012 10:20 pm**

Any update from SMD side ?? Seem so quiet on their side....Cant wait to receive it

Posted: **Tue May 15, 2012 11:31 am**

This just up from SMD. A few more formats supported now. Notably, the 60Hz 3D SBS 1080 formats and a 30Hz 3D full resolution 1080 format! Also a couple of low res formats that are useful for laptop gaming.

http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/1/po ... ation.html

Posted: **Tue May 15, 2012 11:37 am**

The new update isn't about laptops. It's all about TV, as those are the resolutions used for DVDs and SD broadcast (one of which was also used for VGA) and 50Hz refresh rate for European broadcasts. 1080p60 SbS and 1920x2160@30Hz TaB were announced earlier.
If one wanted to nitpick and go for esoteric PC support, 400 and 600 line modes are still absent (but I don't care at all). Either way this is really good news.

I believe it also means they've covered every mode mandated by the HDMI specification.

Posted: **Tue May 15, 2012 11:54 am**

Yeah but if you've got a laptop with an integrated video card, then those 640x480 resolutions might be the only way to get decent frame-rates.

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 1:51 pm**

I ran across one early report of the unit that claims that 720 resolution is not upscaled to 1080, and instead is just displayed in a smaller screen region. That correlates with other reports that SMD did not include a hardware scaler with the product, and would mean that it does not make use of the entire FOV when displaying 720p 3D at 60Hz. I hope that's not true.

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 2:55 pm**

Me too. Upscaled 720p 3D is a lot less taxing on the GPU than 1080p SBS 3D.

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 3:07 pm**

brantlew wrote:I ran across one early report of the unit that claims that 720 resolution is not upscaled to 1080, and instead is just displayed in a smaller screen region. That correlates with other reports that SMD did not include a hardware scaler with the product, and would mean that it does not make use of the entire FOV when displaying 720p 3D at 60Hz. I hope that's not true.

Could you give a link to the report ?

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 4:46 pm**

3dvison wrote:Could you give a link to the report ?

The 05/19/2012 comments
http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/1/po ... l#comments

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 5:18 pm**

Does it mean that the diagonal view angle is effectively lowered from 45 to 30 for 720p. If that's the case it's not good for 720p gaming.

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 5:52 pm**

They can't be serious! Why would they release a product in such a state??!?!!

Posted: **Sat May 19, 2012 7:45 pm**

brantlew wrote:I ran across one early report of the unit that claims that 720 resolution is not upscaled to 1080, and instead is just displayed in a smaller screen region. That correlates with other reports that SMD did not include a hardware scaler with the product, and would mean that it does not make use of the entire FOV when displaying 720p 3D at 60Hz. I hope that's not true.

If it's true, then it's no go for 3D Vision gamer as it doesn't support SBS or TnS.

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 12:02 am**

cybereality wrote:They can't be serious! Why would they release a product in such a state??!?!!

At least the firmware is updateable. I can see where they would want to focus on getting the product out there, and fixing stuff later.

Assuming, of course, this is something they can fix.

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 2:17 am**

what i don't get from this "problem", first everyone complained about that 720p scaled to a 1080p monitor would make the picture quality bad.

So now everyone want that "bad quality feature" as they didn't include it? why? so you can rant about the bad picture quality when looking on the scaled picture?

i know about the icon size and other uses where the zoom might be nice(dunno if its possible to get a function in the controller to switch scaler on and off)

On the other hand its just one report up to now. I have here games too, that even when my monitor is 1080p(normaly its scales movies and games), that don't scale that one.
Maybe Nvidia Driver bug or something else, last game i had that was i think Darkfall Online, but not sure.

maybe there is a short hotfix to enable upscaling in the graphic card driver?
think its up to now a bit to early to make it a big nogo(maybe for consoleros and AR people its now a disappointment)

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 6:48 am**

faker wrote:what i don't get from this "problem", first everyone complained about that 720p scaled to a 1080p monitor would make the picture quality bad.

That's quite subjective. A poor scaling would certainly look bad; for instance, if every other line was doubled. I have a HP monitor (LP2475w) that suffers from something like this.. it doesn't seem to be that even, but it certainly does double lines unevenly causing seams all over, which looks crappy particularly when the view rotates. There are a bunch of other ways to scale too, some from signal theory (where the pixel values are regarded as point samples) and some more suited for computer graphics (where we may regard a pixel as a filled rectangle).
For the particular case of 720 to 1080 scaling, I would like to see the rectangle based mode, meaning a pixel group like this:

Code: Select all

A B
C D

Is scaled into something like this:

Code: Select all

A   ab  B
ac abcd bd
C   cd  D

(Where abcd means average of those pixels.) This is the filled rectangle interpretation of a 2:3 scaling with equal pixel aspect ratio. Technically you'd want the averaging to be color accurate too (taking gamma into account), but that can be sacrificed (though there's no reason to if the display acts linearly).

The reason to do this scaling is to preserve field of view. For SD resolutions, you want uneven scaling to recover aspect ratio. What would be really unacceptable is a scaler that prevents a direct pixel mapping; some TVs do that, to satisfy ancient overscan conventions.

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 6:49 am**

Considering that 720P without scaling would be a lesser FOV, no-one anticipated this as a 'solution' to 720P scaling issues. Which no one ever really complained about anyway, just noted its disadvantages, compared to full speed 1080P rendering.

Since the hmd doesn't support 1080P 3D at over 30hz, this means that for 3D @ decent frame rates you'll need to run at 720P. Its going to hold back their sales unless they can fix this (or it turns out to just be a false report, I am not going to jump to any conclusions just yet).

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 10:07 am**

PalmerTech wrote: At least the firmware is updateable. I can see where they would want to focus on getting the product out there, and fixing stuff later.

Assuming, of course, this is something they can fix.

I'm guessing that it would require a new controller box, not just a firmware update to fix. So at least you would not need to upgrade the entire unit. I guess it's possible that you could fix this with a Windows display driver as well and do the upscaling on the video card. But I don't know enough about it to understand how the driver would fit into the rendering and transmission pipeline. Hopefully you could catch and upscale the frames before they were encoded into HDMI. Of course this is only an option for PC's. If you are talking about broadcast signals (sat & tv) and console games, then you're screwed without a hardware scaler.

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 1:24 pm**

What I don't understand is that it supports SBS, so it must have some scaling capabilities if it can scale the half res up to full res.

Posted: **Sun May 20, 2012 1:32 pm**

So the other resolutions like 640*480 would be small also ?
That seems strange they would over look this.
I hope the guy just missed a setting in the menu.
The funny thing is, I would probably only be using the lower resolutions when I want a Big Blown-Up, Fat Looking screen display. I would not be using 640*480 for sharp text, thats what 1080 resolution is for.

Posted: **Mon May 21, 2012 3:20 am**

SMD have now confirmed that the device does not currently scale, and they will offer the option to scale 720 in a firmware update in about a month.

Posted: **Mon May 21, 2012 5:30 am**

I agree with SMD that you want to pixel map, thats why I'll stay away form this product until 1080p@60hz is accepted, which it probably wont be for a long time if they cant hack support for it somehow :/

Posted: **Mon May 21, 2012 8:11 am**

yann wrote:SMD have now confirmed that the device does not currently scale, and they will offer the option to scale 720 in a firmware update in about a month.

That's great news! Strange that they did not realize during development that this would be an important feature, but it is wonderful that they are so responsive to customer needs and inquiries.

Posted: **Mon May 21, 2012 5:47 pm**

Ok, that's at least good to hear they are working on it. Seems like a massive over-sight, though.

Posted: **Tue May 22, 2012 1:48 am**

I haven't had any recent experience from scalers, but I was a late adopter of TFT screens and one of the reasons where that you were locked to one res. and if you went out side of that the image quality was like crap. I hope its not the case with more modern controllers

Posted: **Tue May 22, 2012 4:57 am**

I just wonder if the scaler is not build into the hardware, how good would the scaler be if it's implemented in software.

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