Build Your Own: Wall-Sized 3D Gaming, Just Like Theaters Do It

Benchmark Results: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty is an extremely popular shooter, so we put it through the paces with our 3D stereo drivers to see just how much fun it would be. This game is probably the most serious shooter we use for our tests and the third dimension definitely adds an aspect of situational awareness that we appreciated.

Game Settings:

We set the native projector resolution to 1280x720 and the game's visual detail to the highest-possible settings with 4x MSAA.

Game Experience Using the TriDef Ignition driver:

The 3D effect is excellent. Once again, the TriDef driver does a perfect job. Our only complaint would be that aiming is difficult as the crosshairs didn't seem to line up with exactly where we are shooting. The TriDef developers anticipated this difficulty and programmed an option for a laser sight in the driver.

The Virtual 3D option doesn’t help performance with the Radeon card and, in fact, actually seems to mess with some item perspectives. However, with the GeForce card, we do see a performance boost as demonstrated in the benchmark below.

Game Experience Using the iZ3D Driver:

The depth of the scene is well-rendered, but once again we experience some anomalies that distract from the game. In this case, it seems that the images serving as the game’s background horizon and sky are grossly out of sync. Also, looking down the gun sight--a necessary part of the Call of Duty experience--results in an impossible-to-aim situation where each eye is treated with a separate image of the gun barrel obstructing the target. While the iZ3D driver does offer a 3D-compatible gun sight, the view remains obstructed by the gun itself. However, a workaround for this issue exists by changing the game's iZ3D profile and setting the separation mode to left shift instead of the default symmetric. After this change, if you close your left eye, you can look right down the gun sight with the right eye. At best, this is an accurate simulation of how a gun sight is actually used, but at worst it is an irritation. Given the sky texture problem we'd probably use the TriDef driver for this game anyway.

CoD:MW2 3D Stereo Performance:

The Radeon card gets a boost from the TriDef Virtual 3D mode, but the GeForce takes a performance hit. The iZ3D driver seems to favor the GeForce card by a large amount. Both the GeForce and Radeon cards sport an identical frame rate without any stereo 3D driver enabled, suggesting a CPU bottleneck. In any case, we'd use the standard TriDef driver to play the game, and in this scenario, both cards deliver about 30 FPS.