Blu-ray 3D On The PC: The Tom's Hardware Review

The 3D Blu-ray User Experience: Installation And Use

The systems sent to us for testing were pre-configured and good-to-go on arrival, but we are also trying our hand at making things work on our own test system. We chronicle that here.

The first step, of course, is to install the graphics driver. In this case, it is a pre-release 257.01 driver that includes 3D Vision support. The install ran without a hitch, and after a reboot, we made sure that the monitor is set to its native 1920x1080 resolution with a 120 Hz refresh rate.

After this, we ran the 3D Vision wizard to make sure the 3D hardware was playing nice, but we had a slight problem with the 3D Vision IR emitter in that it refused to be detected, and the system would not assign a driver to it. However, we manually worked around this issue by downloading a separate 3D Vision driver from Nvidia’s Web site: Nvidia_3D_Vision_v197.41_driver.exe. We extracted the archive's files into a folder so we could apply the specific emitter USB driver to the device. The file we were looking for was nvstusb.inf. It can be manually assigned as the 3D Vision IR emitter's driver through the Windows device manager.

With the emitter working, we were able to test 3D Vision through Nvidia's driver panel, and sure enough, everything worked. After that, we were left to install CyberLink's software; that process went off without a hitch.

Before we rock a Blu-ray 3D disc, we need to set the appropriate options in PowerDVD's 3D settings. We made sure that 3D playback was enabled, and that the display type was set to the appropriate 120 Hz page-flipped option.

It was smooth sailing after that. We did notice an occasional bug where PowerDVD sometimes hiccups when a disc is started by flashing a blank black screen. But the tests went smoothly. For the most part, the Blu-ray 3D infrastructure appears to be on the verge of readiness for the early adopters.