HP Envy 17 3D: 3D Movies on the Go

13.01.2011

Driving the display is the aforementioned Mobility Radeon HD 5850, which is starting to get a little long in the tooth. For gaming in "normal" 3D, it still serves pretty well. But when you use stereoscopic 3D, you need twice the frame rate. That's a difficult proposition for most mobile GPUs. The way to get around performance issues is to cut the resolution to 1280 by 720. Given the reduced brightness and contrast, you won't notice large differences in image quality, and the 3D effect can be quite impressive.

When it works.

Therein lies the rub. Tridef's software solution for stereoscopic 3D gaming is far from perfect, especially when you compare it to Nvidia's 3DVision. When you first launch Ignition (the game-launching software), you scan the system for games, but the utility only found two titles: Dawn of War II and Civilization V. The rest of the games that were installed had to be manually added.

When the games were actually run, the overall experience can become frustrating.

Just Cause 2 is, in fact, a DirectX 10 game. F1 2010, which yielded a similar error, is DX11. I tried updating the Tridef software from its Website, but the problem persisted.