Nvidia sure was rather late lately, in offering the latest technology. It took them nearly a year to officially release the Fermi ‘woodscrew’ GTX400-series cards to counter AMD’s hot-selling DirectX11 graphic card the HD5000-series. What’s more, they lack a selling point to counter AMD’s Eyefinity multi-display technology. Despite the much delays and controversial, Nvidia is ready to proof that their 3D Vision Surround (3D-VS) is not just a ‘3D Eyefinity’.

In comparison to AMD’s Eyefinity, Nvidia’s 3D-VS do come much more costly in overall setup. The lack of dedicated hardware means that virtually none of NVIDIA’s cards have enough display outputs for 3D-VS, with the exception of the GeForce GTX 295, the only card that has an HDMI output on the daughter card. At least 2 cards operating in SLI are required to take advantage of 3D-VS. This is due to the fact that the second card’s display outputs are needed to drive the 3^rd monitor. What’s more, 3D-VS can only display 3 monitors due to limitation on the software, while AMD’s Eyefinity version graphic cards can power up 6 displays at one go.

While the Nvidia 3D-VS does have its drawback, it also has its ‘backward compatible’ point to back it up. This means that with an update to the latest beta driver 258.69, older GT200 card users can also use 3D-VS. AMD users however, can only gain Eyefinity through HD5000-series cards, and also power up 6-display Eyefinity setup by the only means of getting an Eyefinity edition card.

The benefit of 3D-VS also the (duh! Obvious!) 3D display gimmick. With the combination of the Nvidia 3D Vision and 3D glasses, users can setup 3D for their rigs to watch 3D movies and games. The approach is rather interesting too. Nvidia has stick with Alternate Frame Rendering while at the same time having 1 GPU render both the left and right eye versions of any individual frame, rather than having each GPU work on each eye. It’s truly alternate frame rendering rather than alternate eye rendering. Under normal circumstances having the same GPU render two images in a row would increase input lag, but when it comes to 3D Vision there’ s no penalty since the second image represents the same game state as the first image, meaning the pre-rendered frame count isn’t actually higher as it would initially appear.

[via Anandtech]