NVidia has just rolled out their own answer to the ATI Eyefinity system: 3D Vision Surround. It looks impressive, however comes with several caveats:
- Using 3 monitors requires 2 video cards in SLI configuraiton
- The 3 monitors must be identical, as in not just the same size but same Model Number
- Limited to 3 monitors
That said, it’s an exciting offering. Unlike AMD’s Eyefinity, NVidia decided to bring 3D Vision Surround to the table a bit late in hardware development so it’s entirely a Software solution.
The biggest remaining question right now will be whether a pure-software approach differs from AMD’s hardware + software approach in terms of performance and game compatibility. NVIDIA’s own internal benchmarks have a SLI GTX 480 setup beating a CF 5870 2GB setup, but the GTX 480 is already faster than the Radeon HD 5870 so this wouldn’t be wholly surprising. As for compatibility we do know that NVIDIA is still fighting with the issue much like AMD has been, as NVIDIA is suggesting the use of the 3rd party Widescreen Fixer to fix the aspect ratio of several games
They also made some interesting decisions like using completely Frame-Alternate rendering: eg: GPU1 renders both left and right eyes full-frame, while GPU2 renders the next frame left & right eye. This guarantee’s synchronization between eyes (since a single GPU is rendering both eyes from a single set of data), while reducing input lag and latency by freeing up the second GPU to render the next frame.
The feature itself is still in beta, but available to the public to try out. They support adjusting for bezels at the driver level, which is a nice feature, but have disabled anti-aliasing levels over 2x when operating in 3D Vision Surround mode. Hopefully these kinks will be ironed out before it goes “official”.
via NVIDIA Launches 3D Vision Surround – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.
