Yes, I caved in to sparkling reviews and curiosity, and got the Nvidia stereoscopic gaming setup with the 22" 120 Hz display. Now, I haven't really owned it long enough (<24 hours at this point) to call myself a highly experienced user, but skimming some people's supposed "expertise" on such topics in the past week, and given that I took an entire fucking course on this stuff, I don't feel too out-of-place trying to spread some more accurate information about things which are potentially very confusing but also very cool when applied to gaming.

120 Hz displays
The most awful thing I read this past week was that the human eye can't see anything over 18 frames per second, which is just bogus. Movies show 24 a second and look less smooth than home video. Why? Because you can see more than 18 fps!

I know what you're probably thinking, though. "WTF 120 Hz? My monitor does 60 for games and it looks totally smooth. Why do you need double that?" Sadly, I don't really have a great answer to that. All I can say is that when you play a game displayed at 120 fps, it just looks... buttery smooth. Like, the motion is surreal. Spin your character around, watch somebody run past... shit, even drag a window around on your desktop. When going from 120 Hz to 60 Hz on my display, the difference felt like 60 fps vs 15 fps on a regular display. It's inexplicably and disturbingly smooth. It even takes a bit of time to get used to the sensation. Perhaps the reason has to do with the fact that you're not just looking at a static target, your eyes are darting around to follow things on the screen, which can result in temporal aliasing. Anyway, summary of why you want 120 Hz displays for games: they're fucking gorgeous in ways that can only be understood when seen.

Of course, they have an added bonus for people watching pre-recorded video. Movies and TV are/were generally recorded at 24 and 30-ish fps, and as luck would have it, 120 is the smallest number which evenly divides both 24 and 30. So whether you're playing from 24 or 30 fps video, you can display each frame for a consistent amount of time (5 or 4 frames respectively). Add in the potential to interpolate frames, and you get a much smoother viewing experience. Compare this to current displays which do something silly and strange, like alternating between showing a frame twice and showing the next one three times (2*12 + 3*12 = 60 fps), and it should be pretty apparent that you're getting both potential for smoother motion, and more even timing between frames.

Now, on to the cool stuff about 3D, which I'm sure is the only reason that all 5 of you are reading this.

3D displays and game/movie effects
I'm pretty sure that by now, most everyone reading this has seen some form of 3D illusion in video format. Amusement parks, polarized glasses in a theater, red and blue lenses for a TV, maybe even real VR stuff that. If you haven't seen that, I hope you've seen Magic Eye or other autostereograms--they follow a similar principle. Basically, every practical method involves getting a different image to your left and right eye. Why? Because it is the difference in images we get from our eyes that lets us feel depth on totally static scenes. Polarized lenses, often seen in amusement parks, use the orientation of light so to say, to project two images onto a screen and block out a different one for each eye. Red and blue lenses do similar things, though they do it using color (red light seen through a red lens is visible, but almost black seen through the blue lens, similar for blue light through blue and red lenses). Head-mounted displays obviously have it easy, they just have one display in front of each eye... if you consider the optics problems and very fine quality of the displays to be easy to deal with.

Anyway, on to how this all relates to what I've got. What I have is a system with active glasses. What that means is that the lenses actively alternate between being dark or transparent, 120 times a second. So 60 times a second one side is dark while the other is clear, and 60 times a second that side is clear while the other is dark. By synchronizing it with a display that can show 120 frames a second, you can display alternating frames and ensure that each eye gets the frame you want. So yes, to get the 3D effect, I have to wear what basically look and act like $200 sunglasses, meticulously timed with the redraw of my monitor. At least they're wireless.

But the effect is very cool. In theory, it can make stuff look like it's infinitely far away, or as close as your nose. Obviously (to me at least) it can only make things appear to be in the virtual tapered box from your eyes to the edge of the screen and continuing out to infinity behind the monitor. Perhaps the more sensible way of thinking about it is, it can make any point on the image appear to be as close or far from you as you'd like. In practice, it does that to make surfaces and objects appear to stick out of the screen or recede into the distance, giving you the exact same sort of feeling of depth that you get when looking down a hallway, or really over any complex scene.

I've heard people claim that it's just a gimmick. I disagree heartily. The 3D placement of the objects in the game world is used to precisely display objects as they'd be seen in 3D were it the real world. The effect itself is something that we're used to seeing every day on just about everything except 2D drawings and images. Really, calling it a gimmick is about as inappropriate as it would be to call color a gimmick. It's something which we're used to seeing, but couldn't always be reproduced effectively, and is just becoming technically feasible to incorporate (well, it's been around in PC games for 10+ years, but the point remains). Although you might be able to get along without it, it's really just not the same.

How is the effect, though? It's hard to describe, but I will say that it's not like adding texture or polygons to a model. You're not so much changing the look of the world as you're changing the feel of the world. I'm dead serious. Close one eye. Keep your head entirely still, look at a motionless scene. Maybe put some objects on a table and view it from a really shallow angle. How does the scene look? Flat. You can tell what's in front of what other things because of visual overlapping and relative sizes and shadows, but you can at best guess how far away something suspended in the air is. Now open your other eye. The portion of the scene that you could see before looks the same, but you can feel how far away things are. Your brain combines the two images automatically and gives you a feeling of the depth for everything you can see. Stereoscopic displays do the same thing with your virtual game worlds.

The good and bad
The good stuff about the system? You could play an RTS and have air units engage in a dogfight which occasionally takes them out of the screen, above your keyboard. You could zoom in close enough to something that it sticks out at you and you recoil instinctively to keep away from it. Zombies don't just look, but feel like they're running towards you. Close things, such as your limbs, weapons, sniper scopes, and the insides of vehicles, all feel very real. Most of this (except for the stuff popping out of the monitor, that's only in some games, like WoW) works with hundreds of popular DirectX titles (and some obscure ones, like No One Lives Forever 2... though I'm glad they support my favorite shooter evar). You can even adjust the intensity of the depth effect to get yourself used to it.

Now the bad stuff. It doesn't work with every title. Audiosurf doesn't do the effect at all, OpenGL games (Doom, Quake, etc) don't work with it. Even before you start the 3D parts of games there can be random quirks where it tries to draw the menus in 3D, but with so much depth that it's simply impossible to both focus on the text and the button frames which are at different levels. Your best bet for menus is to push the button which toggles the effect, really. In the games themselves, there are issues abound with the effect. In Valve games like TF2 and L4D, it draws names and icons at screen depth, so while you're focusing on a 3D world you have names popping up in your face, which are impossible to read quickly--immensely distracting too. In games with mouse cursors, the cursors are also drawn at screen depth, not so fun for picking units in 3D space in an RTS. Fire and other effects are often done by drawing something 2D in 3D space, the idea being that it won't look bad in 2D. In 3D the illusion falls apart somewhat, and it indeed looks like the 2D texture in 3D space that it is. And some games have much more serious and annoying issues, such as having clouds drawn at screen depth, making them appear to be very close to you. You get weird issues with crosshairs too--Portal and some other games are unplayable for me because it draws the crosshairs at screen depth and getting them to line up with something further back in the scene is hard and distracting. The same thing happens when using sniper scopes, you're trying to both focus on something very close and something very far, and it doesn't work--your best bet is to use it like a real scope and close one of your eyes.

And don't let me forget about weapon depth! Normally, when you hold a weapon, it recedes into the distance just fine and everything looks good. And when you look at a wall, you can feel how far away it is, and that's fine. But when the game devs are retards, which they usually are, things get messed up when you're too close to a wall (within a foot or two). They let you get so close that the end of your weapon is further away from you than the wall, but the two don't intersect, because they probably render your character differently from the rest of the 3D world, and then just overlay the two. This looks odd in 2D when your face is 6 inches from a wall but you're holding a sniper rifle 3 feet from your chest, but in 3D you can feel the depth of the two things and you know that the gun is further than the wall, but it feels wrong because the gun is clearly in front of the wall.

There are technical issues, too. The lenses of the glasses don't go to complete opacity, so you can see some faint ghosting from the other eye's image--especially noticeable when the scene has a lot of contrast. Because each lens is black half the time, you only get half the light at best, so the scene is twice as dark--you don't notice this terribly in some games, like L4D, but in really bright games it's odd to have a lot of stuff washed out and darker. The glasses make other things look weird, too--my laptop display seems to have a rainbow sheen on it, and my other desktop display and some other light sources appear to flicker and need to be turned off so as not to distract. And of course, after trying games at 120 fps, the mere 60 that you get for the glasses feels inadequate!

Even the display itself isn't the highest quality. It's a TN panel, which previously wouldn't have meant a whole lot to me, but I now realize is the reason that my two current widescreen displays look kinda crappy. TN panels are popular because they're cheap. The color reproduction and viewing angles aren't so great and the displays are a tad on the grainy side, extremely visible in the upper right corners.

Conclusions
But... don't ask me whether I'd get this or not if I knew what I know now. I can't yet make that call. I mean, the 3D effect is very cool, and I'm assuming that as I become more used to it and games better support it, it'll only become more immersive and useful. And even when I don't use the 3D effect ($200 in hardware) I can still enjoy the 120 fps that the display can put out ($400 in hardware).

What I will definitively say is that I fully intend to buy another 120 Hz display when they come out in larger sizes and higher qualities, to hell with price premiums. I forsee myself sinking a lot of money into graphics hardware to push games out at 1920x1200@120Hz in the future, ha. 3D stereoscopic vision is something I'll keep a close watch on, though I don't see myself buying another pair of glasses any time soon... the current ones work reasonably well, and for better or worse I own them.

In other news, my GTX 260s finally have to actually do work on a daily basis.