Yesterday we visited with NVIDIA at E3 2011 and got demos of three titles running on NVIDIA hardware as well as a sneak peek at a DirectX 11 version of Crysis 2.
We demoed Alice: Madness Returns, Duke Nukem Forever, and Dungeon Siege III. All three titles were running on Acer 3D displays and had active shutter 3D glasses attached. Here are our impressions:
Alice: Madness Returns
A breautiful game, to be sure. We went into the video settings and found one curious anomaly however: AA was turned off. PhysX was set to “high”, so we switched it off to see if we could tell a difference.
There is definitely a noticeable difference between “high” PhysX and “low”. “Low” uses CPU only for physics; places where there were differences included butteryfly particle effects around Alice as she spins and dodges, extra particles around enemies when you hurt and destroy them, and neat liquid effects from enemies made of an oily gloop. With PhysX on low, the particles were not as ornate and showy.
This game doesn’t suffer too badly from the “3D darkness”; the fact that 3D active-shutter glasses really make the game significantly darker. For Alice’s world, the effect isn’t so bad, but it’s still noticeable. With the glasses of, the game is bright and colorful and looks better.
While most things looked pretty good in 3D, one glaring annoyance was the aiming reticle. It was blurry and couldn’t seem to find its “plane”. It was so bad that it affected my ability to aim a ranged weapon.
Duke Nukem Forever
Duke translates well to 3D. The game is old-fashioned looking, with shiny textures, so it’s a bit brighter than most. Still, it looks better without it. I suppose this is just my personal opinion, but I feel like most of the gamers I know would agree with me. My cohort Nathan seemed to enjoy it in 3D, so I guess that’s something.
Dungeon Siege III
Dungeon Siege III is another beautiful game, with many bright colors and saturated magical effects. Of course, this is all ruined by 3D glasses. The game looked far worse with the glasses on; yes, the trees popped out, and yes the rocks were 3D, but this is just not a compelling use case, especially for a game with a fixed field of view like Dungeon Siege. Without the glasses, the game looked fantastic, but there was some strange texture popping. I walked into an area and began walking down the path, and a monster approached. Right when I took my first swing, all the background objects popped into existence; the trees, the rocks, and the rest of the scenery. Strange.
Tegra 2
Back in 2010 we called Tegra 2 one of the top five best-in-show at CES. We stand behind that; gaming on a Tegra 2-powered Motorola Xoom is just stunning. Great framerates, smooth animations, good 3D performance, nice effects… the games we tested on Tegra 2-powered tablets and netbooks were stellar. Samurai II: Vengeance looked beautiful and ran wonderfully on these devices.
As you can see, I’m really not at all excited about 3D, and what NVIDIA was showing on the desktop side was just plain uninspiring. On the flip side, the mobile stuff they’re doing is extremely interesting. NVIDIA seems to be suffering a bit of an identity crisis; sure, core gaming and PC hardware put them where they are today, but they’re just not doing anything exciting on that front; their most drool-worthy nerd-boner moments are all on mobile. It’s a conundrum.
Their obvious continuing push for 3D is feeling very contrived at this point. We kept hearing, “Isn’t this great? Doesn’t that look awesome?” It was like the old “Hey guys? You like me, right?” bit.
No, we don’t like you. 3D sucks, let’s just all admit it and move on.
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