Almost all of us have gone to see a movie in 3D at the theaters at this point. Unlike most 3D designs at home, movie theaters use a passive 3D setup with polarized glasses that enable you to watch 3D without needing expensive, battery powered glasses.

Though the implementation is slightly different, passive 3D technology has started to come to the home as well, and the ViewSonic V3D231 is one of the first computer monitors to use it. Will the advantages of passive 3D outweigh the negatives in a PC environment? Find out as well as how the Viewsonic V3D231 fares in non-3D tasks in our full review.

The big push in movies and displays has been 3D the past few years. In movies it’s ranged from well designed and executed (Avatar) to a gimmick to charge $4 more per ticket (many examples), but for gaming, it potentially has more direct benefits. Virtually every game now is rendered in 3D, and so all of the information is there that is needed to show the game in 3D to the user, unlike the fake 2D to 3D conversions that many films use. Running in active 3D also means a panel that works at a true 120Hz, so even your 2D image can benefit.

There are a variety of things to consider when purchasing a new LCD, and the 3D (120Hz) aspect really muddies the waters. Nearly all 120Hz/3D consumer displays use TN panels, and there's still a question of whether 3D is even worth pursuing. We'll investigate these areas and more in our review of the Samsung S23A750D.

It’s been 7 months since the launch of the first Fermi cards, and at long last we’re here: we’ve reached the end of the road on the Fermi launch. Today NVIDIA is launching the final GPU in the first-generation Fermi stack into the add-in card market, launching the GeForce GT 430 and the GF108 GPU that powers it. After months of launches and quite a bit of anticipation we have the complete picture of Fermi, from the massive GTX 480 to today’s tiny GT 430.

For the GT 430, NVIDIA is taking an interesting position. AMD and NVIDIA like to talk up their cheaper cards’ capabilities in HTPC environments but this is normally in the guise of an added feature. Rarely do we see a card launched on one or two features and today is one of those launches. NVIDIA believes that they’ve made the ultimate HTPC card, and that’s the line they’re going to be using to sell it; gamers need not apply. So just what is NVIDIA up to, and do they really have the new king of the HTPC cards? Let’s find out.

ASRock is one of the companies held in high esteem by everyone here at AnandTech. We have been reviewing their HTPC offerings since they first came out their Ion based HTPC last year. After starting out at the low end, they soon moved up to place mid-range products aimed at the mainstream consumer with the Core 100 series. The Core 100 HT-BD received a very good review from us, and when ASRock informed us about their high-end offering in the Vision 3D, we were quite excited.

When a company is confident enough to send across an engineering sample prior to sending across the production review unit, it is quite clear that they are extremely proud of their product and its features. We have been playing with the Vision 3D for close to a month now (first with the engineering sample, and then with the review unit). Read on to find out more about the Vision 3D and how it performs.

After a bit of ballyhoo and a bit more of a delay, NVIDIA is finally ready to launch their competitor to AMD’s triple-monitor Eyefinity technology: 3D Vision Surround.

As a quick refresher, we first learned about 3D Vision Surround at CES 2010, where NVIDIA was officially announced the technology and was offering both public and private demonstrations of the technology. At the time they had it running on both GTX 200 series cards and what would become the GTX 400 series. 3D Vision Surround was to be NVIDIA’s competition to AMD’s Eyefinity technology and then-some: not only would NVIDIA match AMD’s Eyefinity triple-monitor capabilities in the 2D space, but they would extend the concept by merging it with their 3D Vision technology for 3D Vision Surround.

NVIDIA has previously told us that they’ve been sitting on the concept for some time with no apparent market for it, with the success of Eyefinity and Matrox’s TripleHead2Go finally motivating NVIDIA to move forward with the technology. The result of this delayed plan is an interesting technology that in many ways is NVIDIA’s version of Eyefinity, and in other ways is entirely different. In a nutshell: it’s not just 3D Eyefinity.