Nvidia 3D Vision Vs. AMD HD3D: 18 Games, Evaluated

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It’s about time that someone performed a meaningful comparison of 3D-enabled games using Nvidia’s 3D Vision and AMD’s HD3D. We put 18 different titles under the microscope to determine which technology gives you the most playability, most often.

F1 2010

AMD HD3D and the TriDef Ignition Driver:

We found that the default F1 2010 TriDef Ignition profile wasn't as good as the default profile with Virtual 3D mode

The default TriDef Ignition profile works well. However, shadows seem muted, you can't access Virtual 3D mode, and the frame rate is a little choppy.

Because of these problems, we swapped the F1 2010 profile out in favor of the generic one and used Virtual 3D mode. This proves to be the better solution, as visuals are great and the frame rate is vastly improved. Unfortunately it's not perfect due to some anomalies caused by the depth buffer, but this isn't noticeable while driving.

Nvidia 3D Vision:

Good 3D result with lowered details

The screenshot looks good, but during actual game play Nvidia's 3D Vision often displays distracting artifacts

3D Vision suffers from shadow, post-processing, and smoke/dust anomalies in F1 2010. The post-process problems are fixed by stepping down from Ultra-High to High detail settings, and shadows must be turned off using the Ultra-Low option. Dust and smoke can be fixed by lowering the particles setting, but we find that it's better to leave it on, as the distraction is minimal.

The loss of shadows doesn't hurt this game much. It looks very good in 3D, but there are still a couple of lighting anomalies that pop up.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.