The other day I got to the communications level in Doom 3. In the room where there is a sign pointing to the monorail and the comm center, it was lagging badly. It was probably about 1 frame per second. There were maybe 2 or 3 guys in there, which would normally be no big deal, but at such a slow frame rate, they really kicked my ass. It was a struggle to aim correctly. I played a couple more rooms, and quit.

Today I skimmed through an article on Doom 3 tweaking. In mentioned all kinds of stuff you could tweak via the Doom 3 command line. It had pictures of what each option would look like. I didn't do any of tweaks mentioned there, but I went into my video card control panel later on. I turned off ansiotrpic filtering and set the image quality to performance.

Then I tried replaying the commincations level. The rooms that were laggy were actually playable. Rejoice! I finished the level with many problems.

I decided to try playing with my MSI 3D glasses. These are very cool, and you can get them for only $20 now if you look around.

At first the test 3D viewer wouldn't work. I went to NVidia's web page to see if they had something to fix it. I had assumed the installed ForceWare 61.77 drivers included the stereo 3D stuff, since the stereo 3D options were already in the control panel. Turns out I had to download the 61.77 3D stereo drivers. I guess I had the stereo controls from when I was using an older stereo driver, and they weren't compatible. The stereo drivers used to be way out of date, I am glad to see they have reached parity with the standard ForceWare.

I launched Doom 3 to give some stereo 3D action a spin. The main demo was all messed up, it had a double image, with the degree of separation much more than the drivers cause by themselves. One of the menu images was off the screen, and the cursor didn't line up with the menus horizontally. I managed to load a saved game. I was glad to see the game worked in stereo at this point, mostly. There were two crosshairs which were distanced by about 8 inches. As you could image, this makes it kinda hard to aim. You can aim by aiming between the crosshairs, but this is tricky. The HUD on the bottom of the screen was also broken. For these reasons I will probably not be playing much of Doom 3 in 3D stereo.

The visual effect of 3D stereo is very fun to experience though. Little things like the empty shells popping out of your gun have more depth and these little visual cues are easier to pick up in stereo. I walked into a hallway with glass protecting against the Mars atmosphere, and the look outside was breathtaking. As soon as the door opened, I could feel the openness of the windows that I did not really notice without the glasses.

So I really hope there will be a patch to fix the 3D stereo issues with Doom 3. I also wish to see a wireless 3D glasses accesory for console gaming systems. Stereo vision has been largely ignored in console gaming, save for the Virtual Boy.

Anyway, I am gonna write something else before I get distracted.