Earlier this week, the industry received word from GDC 2010 that Epic Games has implemented stereoscopic 3D support for NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision solution in Unreal Engine.
Mark Rein, VP and Co-Founder of Epic Games and
Neil Schneider, President & CEO of Meant to be Seen
after SIGGRAPH 2008 UT3 S-3D Demo
While MTBS was very supportive of this, we were concerned that the arrangement would be proprietary – a left/right format that only NVIDIA hardware could understand.
We misjudged this. According to NVIDIA, it’s not native stereoscopic 3D support which passes an exact left and right image to the display. Instead, Unreal Engine has been optimized to render in a “stereo friendly” way. NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision driver will then have a much easier time extrapolating a full stereoscopic 3D gaming experience, and Unreal games will have much higher chances of being 3D Ready.
On the surface, this relationship creates an excellent marketing relationship between Epic Games and NVIDIA’s 3D efforts. More importantly, and this is strictly analysis on our part, these optimizations should also benefit driver developers like DDD and iZ3D because their software is based on very similar principals.
We think this is very commendable. It’s not quite industry-wide support, and it’s not a left/right standard – but it is something that could benefit the industry on the whole. Let’s see how things move ahead!
If time permits, we will try to get connected with Epic Games directly at GDC.
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