After the Samsung 2233rz, another link in the 3D chain arrived this spring, NVIDIA's GeForce 3D Vision. We've been slow to cover them on the English version of the site but with the appearance of new products from Spatial View we’re now publishing a belated test.

Everything if not elegant, we will nevertheless soon be seeing these glasses beside the computer of any gamer (and maybe their television as well). We’re all going to have to get used to them, and maybe even wear them! Here in editorial even non gamers took pleasure in using them to enter a 3D world.

Test: NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision

Adobe have announced the release of an optimised version of its Flash software in 2010. In the list of operating systems supporting version 10 of Flash, one notable absent is the iPhone.

Apple have never really said anything about the use of Flash on its smartphone. And there's a reason for this: Flash is very demanding in terms of processor resources and for the moment doesn't really suit mobile phones (especially until support of the graphics part by Tegra, announced recently).

A Beta version should however soon be available for Google Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian and Windows Mobile, says Shantanu Narayen, CEO at Adobe.

Adobe and NVIDIA have announced what will perhaps be one of the first definite developments of its Open Screen project: their collaboration will allow Flash to use graphics chip capacity for video decoding.

Flash is often criticised for the demands it puts on resources of the central processor. This may well be a significant step forward: according to Adobe, Flash will eventually be able to pass on video decoding, in particular those encoded in H.264, to the graphics processor.

Flash is of course used a lot on the Internet to created applications but also to broadcast multimedia content. In particular it's the technology of choice for numerous video sites such as YouTube. Capacity to broadcast HD video in H.264 is currently very limited, amongst other things by users' computers: decoding this sort of flow is currently too demanding for most netbooks.

If however you can get the work done by the graphics processor, a quite modest setup will do the job: according to a joint statement from Adobe and NVIDIA, a Tegra chip (ARM based system, designed for mobile phones and with a dedicated graphics part) should be able to do this.

This could well accelerate the deployment of HD and also relieve the processor and make Flash videos more user-friendly for netbooks and other mobile devices – while waiting for Open Screen to bring Flash to all types of display.

After the publication of our news 3D screen without glasses: we've tried them, Olivier Dellicour from Spatial View reacted to the news and in particular to our remark about performances in games

The phrase in question is the following: "Even the most powerful current configurations won’t be enough to calculate the images needed for a game that requires significant graphics resources, which means this device is pretty much limited to use with video". According to Dellicourt, this phrase is not representative of reality because, firstly, the screen is used by several gamers including him and the current driver is certified for around forty games. He does recognise that there is a drop in performance but says that this is not as significant as we report in our news.

We asked him to give us some more detail on this point. As there are no official benches the results given by the company are those obtained by CanardPC. According to these, there are 3 to 4 times fewer images processed in Direct X and 5 times fewer in Open GL.

In addition to these results we also received a link to an article on the German site Computerbase.de, who carried out performance tests with an NVIDIA 8800 GT card on the following games: Need for Speed: Most Wanted, UT2004 and Call of Duty 4. The details we want to highlight are those for Call of Duty 4. The graph (if I’ve understood properly, not having much recent German) gives results for 6 second periods for the 2D and 3D modes. The number of images per second falls on average from 45 to a little less than 20. Compterbase.de’s opinion is the following: even with these old titles, you’ll need a powerful setup.

These results do put our own report into context. Saying that the Wazabee 3Dee screen is impossible to use for gaming is wrong: you can use it with a powerful setup. However, I know that these conditions would discourage me. As a relatively demanding gamer, I’m not prepared to see performances fall by between 2 and 5 times, even at the price of not having 3D. Much more powerful cards will be needed or a less demanding solution in terms of image processing.