14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices may be in the lead when it comes to DirectX 11 graphics, but it has hardly put up a fight on the Stereoscopic 3D front, which seems to be getting increasingly more attention with each passing month. ATI's Catalyst drivers haven't, until now, supported output of stereo L/R images at 120Hz. Fortunately, the company's latest driver, ATI Catalyst 10.3, seems to at least be getting closer to completely solving this disadvantage, having now enabled support for such output on middleware developed by 3rd-party vendors.
“AMD has updated its Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors, such as DDD and iZ3D, to output stereo L/R images at 120Hz (60Hz per eye),” a statement from ATI reads.
This is ATI's formal first step towards challenging NVIDIA's 3D Vision technology. NVIDIA's solution is, itself, not ideal, as it relies on the company's proprietary 3D active shutter glasses and also has a relatively limited output device compatibility. However, this technology still has an advantage, because it guarantees acceptable 3D gaming experiences. ATI's solutions, on the other hand, only allow support for devices developed by third parties. This means that, in order to enjoy Stereoscopic 3D on ATI graphics, consumers will need a number of pieces of hardware and software that ATI doesn't have.
End-users will require a special 3D starter pack, such as the ones developed by DDD or iZ3D. The latter is quite well known, costs about $349 and includes a 22-inch monitor and two pairs of polarized glasses. DDD's starter pack is priced at about $199 and includes two pairs of 3D active shutter glasses, a 3D transmitter, a CD with the TriDef 3D experience software for Windows XP/Vista/7 and an activation code. Also, the output device will need to be supported by DDD. This means that customers will have to buy either a special HDTV or the Hyundai P240W 24-inch monitor, which has the rather murderous price of $2,199.
Clearly, AMD's support for Stereoscopic 3D is far less flexible than NVIDIA, which means that the former might have to eventually come up with its own complete solution.