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SamualT

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Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 7:00 am:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

Well, not having too good a luck with my ATI Radeon 9700 and Stereo-3D support, of which there is none, I decided to try a cheapie Nvidia FX 5200 by Megaspeed. It was $52+$5 shipping. Total $57. I hate the thought of putting a card that cost 1/4 of my Radeon in my machine, but...whatever it takes. I chose this Nvidia card because it's all I can afford at the moment and seemed to be the best one for the price.

I made this radical buy because the ATI just has zero stereo support. And the beta OpenGL stereo drivers that came with my most excellent Edimensional shutter glasses just isn't enough for me. They don't work on everything and I'd like DirectX support as well. And eveyone keeps saying how good the Nvidia drivers are compared to everything else.

I'm really thinking that even though the Nvidia FX 5200 is a much inferior card that I probably won't notice the difference except in speed. Most of the cool special features of the Radeon 9700 are bleeding edge and games just don't support that crap and won't for years.

So, what I'm going to do is install about 5 good, cutting edge, game demos and then test both cards and see if I can tell any difference (especially whether I can take the slow down in speed). Then I'll try stereo on the new Nvidia and see what happens. I may play with it for a while but one of these cards will get sold on Ebay ;-)

I'll let you know what happens and if its really worth downgrading just for stereo support. It will probably be 10 days before I receive the new Nvidia because I chose the cheapest shipping; I'm so cheap!

In case you want to know where I got the cheap Nvidia here is the link (http://www.target-sale.com/tusa/items/videoagp/i03812.html ). It was a better deal than I could find on Ebay.

P.S. I will also post my review of the Edimensional shutter glasses after I've had a chance to see them with an Nvidia card. So far they are excellent.
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David Sykes

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Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 12:06 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

Look forward to hearing your results, don't forget :-) .
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nickyj

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Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 9:27 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

Hey, I just got a beta of the DirectX drivers from eDimensional. They are incredibly good, so you may not have to go with nVidia afterall. can't say any more than that at the moment, but i'll keep everyone posted when I find out when they will be officially released.
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SamualT

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Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2003 - 1:38 am:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

nickyj:
What games have you tried them with? I don't have many, but in Descent-3 it didn't work too well. Perhaps I'll try some stuff to see if I can't make it work better. The game or the ED drivers are freaking out my monitor. I can make it work in 1600x1200 but it didn't look very good, kinda small. All other modes make my monitor complain about horizontal and vertcal freqeuncy. It's a fast good monitor. I can easily set it for 100 hz refresh. Hmmm...
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SamualT

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Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2003 - 2:13 am:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

All I get is my monitor saying:

Out of range
H: 30-95 Khz
V: 50-160 Hz
PC Display Settings Correct?

And is it supposed to look small? The box it draws in 1600x1200 only takes about 1/3 of the screen. When I initiate the other modes it begins to make the picture before the monitor complains, and then goes black. Those boxes also look small.
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nickyj

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Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2003 - 3:36 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

yes, you have to lower your refresh to about 60 Hz, which will display at 120 Hz. I've tested everquest, freelancer, il-2, nascar, and a few other games and they're all working well.
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SamualT

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Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2003 - 9:59 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

I see. I had to lock my settings with PowerStrip (a shareware program to play with Monitor stuff). It worked good. It was in stereo 3d at whatever resolution I wanted!

But I found two small problems:
1. I couldn't get "Shift-E" or "Shift-D" to do much. I didn't increase or decrease the effect. I made sure they game wasn't using those keys.
2. The screen is scrunched horizontally. Which is fine for the most part. But when you rotate sideways (Roll) it can make thin things look fat. That is, if your looking at a "narrow" road going off into the distance and you roll sideways then the road looks very fat. This is very disconcerting in a game like Descent where you have full 360 degree Roll, Pitch, and Yaw. Flight simulators arn't going to look too good. But games like Quake where your stuck on the ground would probably be OK.

I'm not sure I like the Over/Under format. I hope the final drivers support Interlace and PageFlip. If they do then we're set! If they don't...well..it won't be as impressive. They have some nice beta drivers, but until they have a final release it is still kind of pie-in-the-sky.

I give them an "E" for effort in any case. They're trying to do more than any of the other companies so I would definitely buy their products rather than someone else's.
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nickyj

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Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2003 - 11:56 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

personally I like over/under for gaming. First it means higher refresh rates so absolutely no flicker even on lower-end monitors. Second, if you double your resolution to 800x1200, you get full resolution 800x600, so no quality loss. Try that, you might like it better and it might take care of the "scrunching". Interlaced is crap, I'd never want my nice looking games in interlaced. I agree, I really respect edimensional for taking the lead on this. as much crap as people on some of the boards have given them for delaying releases, they're the only ones doing anything for the stereo gaming community.
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Anonymous

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Posted on Monday, July 14, 2003 - 11:35 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

How can I get a copy of the edimensional driver's. I have the i-glasses that are like a rebadged version of the edimensional-glasses. The edimensional website say's you need an order number to get the driver's from them ? Can someone post a link where I could find them...
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Anonymous

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Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 3:33 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

edimensional has such a link. Just buy a copy of their glasses, and get their driver.
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Anonymous

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Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 8:46 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

I tried it with a different pair of glasses and it just turned my screen black ;-)

It works greast with the ED-Glasses though.
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Anonymous

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Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - 2:09 am:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IPPrint Post

As Christoph has pointed out time and again, E-Dim didn't do anything to the hardware - just the "drivers". I've run the eDim Beta OpenGL driver (from a Russian site) on a Radeon 9600 Pro with an X3D-badged "Universal" controller and wireless glasses from another company alltogether. Works fine with MOHAA - and looks better than the VR Caddy XP approach did. In fact, it looks well enough that I'm wondering if I shouldn't have gone with eDim when I bought in the first place, but who knew they'd develop drivers?!?! Wish they'd put a price on them and sell them to the rest of us - or that the DirectX drivers would pop up on eMule or something...

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