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In the Forums... |
Posted: May 8, 2001 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen True 3D Asus is the first to offer a GeForce3 card with 3D shutter glasses. These glasses turn on and off in sync with the images on your monitor when they flash left and right. This effect tricks your eyes into believing that there is depth on the monitor display since both your eyes are seeing two slightly different images. You can use the 3D stereo function with all your favorite games thanks to both Direct3D and OpenGL support from Asus. Elsa also offers similar glasses called the Revelators but they only offer 3D in Direct3D tittles.  Not quite your Oakley X-Metal’s but they do offer 3D! I like Asus’ glasses better much more than the Elsa revelators because they’re built better, handle better, easier to work with than the Revelators and fit on your face even if you’re wearing glasses. The construction the Asus glasses are much better and just plan cup your face better. They also provide more eye area coverage than the Revelators. The only drawback that comes when using stereovision is that it reduces your frame rates by a large amount. Although one can argue that the GeForce3 has more than enough juice, some people still find the large drop in performance unacceptable. The good thing is there’s less of a drop thanks to the speed of the GeForce3. You also wouldn’t really want to be playing multiplayer games with the glasses because the depth takes some getting use to and your accuracy in Counter Strike may be reduced significantly. Other than those few drawbacks, the effect is really stunning, especially in high speed racing simulators. Video IN Decking its video cards with video in and out features has always been a feature of Asus Deluxe models of cards and the V8200 Deluxe is no exception. It's fully loaded with S-Video in and Composite in for those of you who love to watch TV or edit videos. Using the included Ulead utilities that Asus has bundled, you can stream in video and watch them like you would a TV or save them to file. The quality of the video image is on par with any other video in solution currently on the market. I recommend using S-video in for sharper images.  The V8200 Deluxe is capable of encoding 740x560 resolution video in AVI format which looks pretty good. From there you can convert the file into any other format like MPEG1. Thanks to the Philips VIVO chip, the V8200 allows very respectable TV out quality and very good Video in quality as well. All video encoding is done by your host processor so it's recommended that you have a 600Mhz class processor or better. During testing, I didn't experience any lag or any disturbances. The video quality had some very minor artifacting but that's expected from the AVI format and from the compression the V8200 encodes to. For those of you who like watching TV on your computer, all you need to do is pipe the signal in via the S-Video or composite cable that's included with the V8200 Deluxe package. There isn't a CATV connector on the card and from the picture you saw, there isn't an integrated TV tuner on the card. If you're wondering how on earth to get CATV signal into the V8200 Deluxe, you'll need a typical VCR. Any VCR out there should come with at least Composite video out and S-video out. Simply plug the CATV cable into your VCR, and connect your VCR's S-video or composite out connector to the back of the V8200 Deluxe. From there on, it's just a matter of relaxing and having fun. Let’s get onto some numbers. |
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