A critical part of stereoscopic 3D driver development is bug and anomaly checking. Imagine testing the same scene on several test machines with each driver release! In addition to being both a time consuming and tedious process, it’s clear that a lot of errors still slip through the cracks.
iZ3D is developing a new technique for doing this effectively. Stereoscopic 3D drivers work by capturing DirectX API calls while a game is being played, adding a second camera view where none previously existed, and passing the complete left and right view to the display. What iZ3D plans to do is create DirectX API dumps so a segment of game play can be recreated and tested on a whim by reading through a DirectX API dump file. If handled correctly, instead of taking hours to retest a game, a whole batch of titles can be tested in minutes.
The real potential behind this would be end users creating DX dump files of problematic games, and sharing them with iZ3D for review and correction. If bugs are in the last few hours of a game, it would save the driver developer the hassle of playing through most of the title.
Unfortunately, game developers probably won’t like the idea of their titles being stripped naked and reduced to DirectX API calls because it could open the door to new hacks, cheats, and consumer privacy issues they haven’t had to deal with before.
If this is the case, a more likely scenario is that end users will submit screen shots of their games, iZ3D will recreate the problem internally , and have a new reference DX file for future testing. Another issue is that different gamers like different separation and convergence settings. Would this testing method take a whole range of visual flexibility into account?
Congrats to iZ3D for coming up with this innovative idea. Let’s see how it turns out!