HP's ENVY 17 3D - HD3D's Difficult Road to a Seamless 3D Experience

The 3D Experience

For 3D, HP installed software by DDD. The demos that came with the machine worked perfectly and are quite good looking as you'd expect given HP's reputation and expertise. However, when I first tried to load games I could not get them to display in S3D. The games are ones I have successfully played on nVidia S3D systems (of which we have several) - I also tried to run a Blu-ray movie, and that would not display 3D (although the bundled demo 3D movie, "Megamind," did.)

I visited the DDD web site and forum looking for a fix and found the latest driver (4.5) and installed it. It had the initial effect of successfully running a game ("Bioshock 2"). But when I tried it again later, it would no longer display S3D. I still couldn't get the 3D BRD movie (Despicable Me) to play 3D.

You can't watch Blu-ray 3D movies... or can you?

Communicating with DDD I learned that they do not support the playback of Blu-ray DVDs in 3D - that is the reason I couldn't view the 3D Blu Ray movie Despicable Me. But later I found I could. What? Then I learned that BRD 3D is supported by the HP MediaSmart media player which uses the CyberLink engine. Oy, this is so confusing.

You've got a HP laptop, with an AMD GPU, the AMD driver, using DirectX 11, and a DDD driver for S3D for some applications and a CyberLink driver for some others. Finally with the help of the DDD CTO I was able to map out the setup.


AMD HD3D: Reliance on 3rd party software can require a lot of user tweaking

The fundamental ability to drive a shutter glass displays and associated emitters is provided by AMD's HD3D driver. AMD's idea is to have an open architecture to democratize the supply of both eyewear and software to support 3D, as contrasted to Nvidia's approach which is a closed system (except for the monitor).

Getting Started 


DDD's TriDef 3D Experience Software Launches in 3D Mode.

Playing a movie is simple enough, plug in the disk in the right-hand slide slot on the machine, put on the glasses, enjoy - courtesy of CyberLink software. You don't need to use any of the TriDef icons for movies or any of the TriDef UI for movies - the main purpose of TriDef on the HP is for games, 3D photos, and 3D Google Earth. To use those apps you start by clicking on a DDD icon, the TriDef Experience.

Clicking on the Experience icon brings us the TriDef menu UI. On the first generation of the HP ENVY 17 3D you can ignore the View movies bar for movies, but it can be used for photos.

The TriDef Experience menu comes up in 3D so better have those glasses ready. Clicking on the Play 3D games takes you to the TriDef Ignition window. You can also get there directly from the desktop icon, by simply double clicking on the green TriDef 3D Ignition.

This is a critical step, and it's not documented or explained. It is one of the weaknesses in the system and the one I suspect will cause the most service calls to HP. In the unit we got there was no visible documentation. A "getting started" card explaining how to use these icons and UIs would be helpful. It turns out that TriDef has many support documents integrated into its software, but the consumer has no way initially, to know how to access these documents.

I thought I'd try Google Earth 3D. I clicked on TriDef 3D Experience and got the 3D menu. Clicked on Google Earth in 3D and got... a web page telling me:

"Google Earth has not been detected on your system."

Hmm, OK, I'm a sophisticated user, I guess I have to download Google Earth, so I click on downloads, but there's nothing there about Google Earth. So I go back and one page and click on TriDef activation, and it asked me for an activation code, which of course I don't have. I started over, and this time when I got the web page (after
clicking on the Google Earth in 3D button) I noticed - just barely - a link to download Google Earth. Did that, installed it, and then I got a Google Earth icon on the desktop.