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

Games

As mentioned, things in Stereovision are started by clicking on the TriDef 3D Experience icon. Click on games in the TriDef Main menu and it brings up the TriDef Ignition control box, or you can skip the menu and just click on the green TriDef Ignition icon.

You launch S3D games through the DDD TriDef Ignition icon, which brings up the TriDepth Ignition control box. If it's your first time, you tell it to scan and find all the games you have on your system. Then as it finds them it puts icons in the control panel.

Loading games is far from satisfying. Most of the time you get a message that says the game does not support DirectX 9, 10, or 11, which of course is absurd. And if you don't launch a game from the TriDef control panel then it won't come up in S3D and there is no other way to activate the S3D.

I was able to get "Bioshock 2" to run. To do such a thing you load all your games on the computer. Then in the TriDef control box you tell it to scan and it finds, and generates an icon, for all the games that are compatible with the DDD driver. It found "Battlefield Bad Company," and "Bioshock 2," but not "Stalker COP" - all games I have run in S3D with no issues on the nVidia 3D Vision system.

I tried "Battlefield: Bad Company 2". I launched it through TriDef 3D Ignition and got a message in the upper right corner: 3D is currently disabled please update your graphics card driver to the latest version. Well of course the latest version is there (8.77.5). You also get a message that the game doesn't support DirectX 9, 10, or 11. For those not paying attention, Battlefied: Bad Company 2 actually supports all three in native mode.

DDD says this particular error message is a known bug. The error message is misleading. It should state something similar to "Please set in game resolution to the display's native resolution". To fix this, simply set the in-game resolution to the notebook's native resolution, (1920x1080@120Hz, for example) in the game Options, and the message disappear. Even better, the game runs in S3D then, and it really is a great experience.

"Bioshock 2" came up in S3D by default.

For "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." games such as "Shadow of Chernobyl" and "Call of Prypat" you have to manually import a generic driver. To do that you right click on the icon and select Properties. Then click on Import and then the scroll the list till you find Generic.

TriDef Ignition diver installer dialog box

The Generic driver will work with just about any game, and once installed you then tweak the games setup options to optimize it for 3D. It's fairly straight forward once you know what to do. You can also click and drag the Stalker game icon into the TriDef Ignition window, and it assigns the generic game profile automatically. When you drag any game icon into the Window, it automatically looks for the correct game profile and if it doesn't find a customized game profile, it automatically assigns the generic game profile]

The system is great, but getting it set up is difficult. If I hadn't been referred by Neil Schneider of the S3D
Gaming Alliance to DDD's Perth, Australia office, and had several email exchanges, a phone call, and a visit from their local rep, I doubt I would have ever gotten it to work. I learned later that DDD is headquartered in Los Angeles, and they also have a rep in San Francisco.

Once a game is installed and running you can bring up the TriDef control menu and adjust depth, and focal plane. That's a terrific capability which allows you get the best effect and to compensate for your individual vision. There are several other controls like Focus Speed, Laser Sight for aiming and menu positioning. It turns out to be a really powerful and useable system once you get past the frustrating startup learning curve. We will be doing a more in-depth report on DDD's S3D capabilities.