The successful introduction of stereoscopic TV systems, such as Samsung's 3D Ready Plasma, requires high quality 3D content to be commercially available to the consumer. Console and PC games provide the most readily accessible source of high quality 3D content. This paper describes innovative developments in a generic, PC-based game driver architecture that addresses the two key issues affecting 3D gaming: quality and speed. At the heart of the quality issue are the same considerations that studios face producing stereoscopic renders from CG movies: how best to perform the mapping from a geometric CG environment into the stereoscopic display volume. The major difference being that for game drivers this mapping cannot be choreographed by hand but must be automatically calculated in real-time without significant impact on performance. Performance is a critical issue when dealing with gaming. Stereoscopic gaming has traditionally meant rendering the scene twice with the associated performance overhead. An alternative approach is to render the scene from one virtual camera position and use information from the z-buffer to generate a stereo pair using Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR). We analyze this trade-off in more detail and provide some results relating to both 3D image quality and render performance.

Date Published: 17 February 2009
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7237, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XX, 72370H (17 February 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.807424

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7237:
Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XX
Andrew J. Woods; Nicolas S. Holliman; John O. Merritt, Editor(s)