Nvidia brings 3D gaming to your living room

20 August 2010 14:53 GMT / By Paul Lamkin

One of the key themes of E3, that subsequently carried over to Gamescom, was that of 3D gaming.

And Pocket-lint was on hand at the Nvidia centre at the Koelnmesse to catch the latest 3D developments from the GPU giant.

Whilst there, we were given a hands-on look at Nvidia's HDMI 1.4 problem solver - 3DTV Play - in action and we have to say that it looked pretty impressive. We mean, how can you fail to be impressed by Lost Planet 2 in 720p 3D at a frame rate that hovered around the 40 per second mark on a 50-inch Panasonic display?

The software will allow you to hook up your GeForce equipped PC to your 3DTV and use your standard stereoscopic glasses.

Nvidia's Ben Berraondo told us that it would mean a far greater amount of 3D content would be available on your 3DTV as there is a far greater range of 3D content available on the web with Flash 10.2, Microsoft's Silverlight and YouTube all having 3D features.

Recent sporting events, including the Masters Golf and the French Open at Roland Garros, have also been broadcast in 3D via the web.

"What we're seeing now is that a small PC unit is now the perfect 3D device for the home", said Berraondo.

Nvidia's 3DTV Play software will be available as a standalone product for around £30, with the software available for nowt to existing Nvidia 3D vision kit owners. It will also be bundled in with all kits sold from the date of its release, which we were told will be September.

As well as the 3DTV Play demo, Nvidia were also showing off an impressive gaming setup, with a souped-up gaming PC, complete with two Nvidia GeForce GTX480 chips on board, impressively displaying the upcoming Mafia 2 title via three screens, in 3D.

That's effectively six screens at 1080p that the chips had to process, but they handled it without even a smidgen of lag.

Berraondo even told us that you could add a fourth monitor for emails, web surfing on so on, if you really wanted to (and if you had a big enough desk).

If Nvidia was looking to impress us, then it succeeded. Our own gaming setup with just the one screen (in 2D) is going to seem pretty poor from now on.