ASUS VG236H 23-inch 3D Display Review: 120Hz is the Future
by Brian Klug on August 7, 2010 2:48 AM EST3D Vision on the VG236H
So let’s talk about 3D for a bit before going into the deep bits of the display’s performance. We’ve already covered NVIDIA’s 3D Vision here, but this review would just be incomplete without discussing how much I’ve changed my mind about 3D after playing with the VG236H.
First off, the NVIDIA 3D Vision kit itself is unchanged, though the packaging is a bit more compact. Inside is a soft cloth bag for the classes, two different nasal guides for comfort, two different length USB cables, the IR base station pyramid, shutter glasses, and demo and driver CDs. It feels like a high end product, with the base station pyramid and glasses sitting in foam cutouts, and the requisite accessories in a compartment above.
Additionally, you’ll need a 3D Vision compatible GPU, and can only drive 120Hz refresh rates over DVI-D, not HDMI. Because you’re rendering twice the frames (one for each eye), you’ll take a framerate hit for enabling 3D, so that GPU best be powerful. Zotac graciously supplied their ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 for testing, which worked perfectly in my testbench.
I noted before that I’ve been skeptical about mainstream 3D gaming for some time now. I’ve seen my fair share of 3D content - though not as much as most of the other AnandTech writers that experienced it at CES on myriad displays - but have an above average grasp for the tech thanks to my optical sciences background.
That out of the way, most of the shutter or polarization based methods I’ve seen up until now suffered from being flickery. Refresh rate just wasn’t high enough, and the result was that I could detect individual frames when moving my head or really looking for it. In theaters, I tried the circularly polarized passive RealD system, and another IMAX 3D system using linear polarization. I had also tried a number of active LCD shutter systems on LCD TVs. While impressive, all of them had noticeable flicker.
The VG236H is the first 3D implementation I’ve played with that doesn’t have noticeable flicker. It just doesn’t. I was immediately impressed with the NVIDIA 3D Vision setup.
NVIDIA thankfully has a pretty comprehensive list of 3D Vision games and how good they perform with the whole system. At the top of the scale is 3D Vision Ready, meaning the game has basically been developed from the start to be viewed in 3D or 2D. Down the list is excellent, good, fair, poor, and not recommended. I first tried a number of ‘good’ titles, and found that while the 3D experience indeed worked, but often small things got in the way.
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HDPeeT - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
120hz HDTVs have more input lag because they don't actually accept 120hz input signals but instead interpolate frames from a 60hz or 24hz signal. This of course takes a considerable amount of time since the display has to analyze several frames before it can create the interpolated frames. 120hz/3D monitors such as this one actually accept a true 120hz signal from your video card, so there is no need to create additional ones through interpolation. All things being equal, a monitor that is receiving 120fps SHOULD have LESS lag than one that is only receiving 60fps. Of course all things might NOT be equal here, as the display might have more processing than some of the faster 60hz monitors out there.Like you, I also don't understand how they came up with the 3.9ms figure............he did say that the Asus was "consistently" 1 frame behind the other LCD, which would mean it has at LEAST 8ms of input lag.
DarkUltra - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
The DVI link tech is not buffering or packadge based. It transfers all three colors, one pixel at a tiime. Fortunately, LCD can have zero input lag (compared to a CRT). Overdrive is not really a digital processing job, like say interpolation or scaling. It just gives the crystals an initial volt bump, then lowers the volt to normal levels. This is so the crystals turn faster.http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma...
However, input lag should be measured on the same output.
testing with two displays connected to the two outputs of a video card and using a clone mode does not give accurate results – they simply vary too much! So in order to compare displays and have an accurate judgment on the presence or lack of input lag you must use a passive video splitter that is capable of splitting a single video signal to two displays.
http://3dvision-blog.com/viewsonic-vx2268wm-has-ju...
nvmarino - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
Great news! Thanks for the extra effort!Stokestack - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
"and I’ve yet to see passive polarization methods used outside the movie theatre"They exist. At SIGGRAPH at least two years ago, someone (I think it was JVC) demoed a 3-D monitor that had every other horizontal line polarized in the opposite direction. Not a bad choice; you got half vertical resolution, but full horizontal resolution.
DarkUltra - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
Is there a white halo effect around text and graphics in 2D "desktop" use like the Acer GD245HQ? Is there a sharpening effect? Can it be adjusted?http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/3688/acergd245h...
dgz - Monday, August 9, 2010 - link
"The necessity for 120Hz panels arose entirely out of the ongoing 3D obsession" is plain wrong.Quake should be played at 120Hz as all other frantic FPS games. For CoD kids 60Hz and "3D" may be fine, though.
dgz - Monday, August 9, 2010 - link
Good ol' CRTs, how I miss you :(dgz - Monday, August 9, 2010 - link
Just asking.Zap - Monday, August 9, 2010 - link
Regarding polarized 3D mentioned in the article, IZ3D has brought polarized 3D tech (using cheap polarized glasses) to gamers for several years. Just wanted to throw that out there.zoxo - Monday, August 9, 2010 - link
I think every 3D technology that uses active glasses is garbage. Manufacturers need to create circularly polarized monitors before it is really usable.