We also occasionally noticed a flickering effect on the screen, while ghosting was sometimes visible. Thankfully, extended use didn’t provide the headaches and dizziness we were expecting, but as always your personal experience may vary in this respect. Playing games in 3D on Acer’s laptop all but crippled it, so we were eager to find out what sort of performance hit occurred on the Asus G51J 3D. Naturally, with its far more powerful hardware, frame rates were much higher. There is, however a noticeable hit when the 3D engine is activated.
Benchmark Tests
PCMark Vantage Results
Longer bars are better
In Call of Duty 4 at 1366 x 768 and 4x AA, we managed 47.2fps. Flicking the 3D switch resulted in 23.9fps – a drop of just under 50 per cent, but certainly still playable. Compare these results to the Acer’s of 29.5fps and 11.6fps (2D and 3D respectively), and it’s clear the G51J 3D is a far more competent 3D gaming laptop.
Longer bars are better
Far Cry 2 saw a similar halving of frame rates. At the laptop’s native resolution and with detail levels set to medium, we achieved averages of 61.4fps with the 3D engine off, and 35.2fps when turned on.
Battery life in Minutes
Longer bars are better
Thanks to the Core i7 processor and GeForce GTX 260M graphics, the laptop also posted impressive scores in our synthetic benchmarks. In PCMark Vantage it managed to clock up an overall score of 6178, while 3DMark Vantage saw it return 5103 in the Performance test.
COMMENTS
nice, but i hope things improve from this...
Particularly, I like how the shutterspecs have a non-laughable framerate now - but as one who was close to offering celebratory sacrifices to whichever small god was responsible when flickeriffic CRTs were washed away by rock steady LCDs, I hope we can re-double that. Anything much below 85Hz makes my eyes and head hurt after a while, and sub-72Hz is nasty. My only, thankfully brief encounters with 56Hz original SVGA were battles against near-unreadable text (monitor phosphors have FAR shorter persistance times than 50Hz TVs) and the 60Hz default was a bane.
No, it's not one of these stupid "powerline fields cook my brain" claims. Set me up a CRT and I will have a fairly good chance of guessing what the refresh rate is if it's between 37i and 75p. The flickering is visible and eventually causes irritation, much like the also-detectable 15.6kHz whistle from a TV tube. However there is an upper limit to what even the most hyperactive rods & cones will detect before their nerve impulses reach 100% duty cycle and the output is considered as "steady". Even with it right up against the eye (making the whole world flicker!) instead of only being a relatively small, distant screen, 120Hz Per Eye should do the trick. We have 200Hz TVs now, allegedly, for whatever good they're supposed to give against a 100Hz (or 50Hz 2D LCD), so it can't be impossible.
By the way, what causes the framerate to drop so? Is it because it's having to render two seperate scenes but not flip the buffer for either of them (except flipping between L & R of course) until both are updated to prevent mind-warping 3-dimensional "tearing"? Like, a 3D Vblank? If they're not doing this, then I see no reason why simply jittering the POV position left and right by a few inches for each drawn frame and dropping the result into a different buffer should be difficult.
Suppose what we need is some kind of SLI-type setup that can offer a reasonable guarantee of maintaining 60fps for each eye to keep up the illusion... well so long as you keep the detail levels down ;)
Finally why do we need to wait for special software to support this concept? Descent, Terra Nova and a few others have been supporting shutterspecs and other true-3D render methods since the mid 90s (ever since fully shaded & textured polys became a practical prospect) and the guys selling the devices allegedly had go-between drivers for a variety of other titles to retroactively enable it. Can't we do similar now? And where, goddammit, is my 3D, HD-movie-capturing digital camera?
External IR emitter?
Has Will asked Asus why the IR emitter for the glasses isn't integrated into the lid?
BTW, the alternating shutter glasses effectively have the fps of the display, as the odd-numbered frames display the left image, and the even-numbered the right.
