Nvidia enables 3D Blu-ray playback on GeForce GPUs

Nvidia has enabled 3D Blu-ray playback on GeForce GPUs with the introduction of its Release 256 family of drivers.

“It’s pretty clear that Hollywood is going 3D. So, it makes sense that now 3D movies are making their way to Blu-ray disc thanks to Nvidia 3D Vision technology. [We are] the first to enable Blu-ray 3D acceleration for the PC,” Nvidia spokesperson Chris Daniel told TG Daily in an e-mailed statement.

“[And] for those of you who own GTX 400 GPUs, you probably noticed that this driver release comes just six weeks after the GTX 400 launch driver. Good news: We’ve already achieved some performance optimizations.”

According to Daniel, the driver also features new visual quality modes, along with improved multi-GPU setup controls.

“We are constantly striving to make the latest PC games not only run faster and smoother, but also look better. [So], with this release, we’re offering new settings in the Nvidia Control Panel for 3-way SLI customers that enable 48x SLI antialiasing (96x for 3-way GTX 400 series PCs),” said Daniels.

“[In addition], we added a higher quality ambient occlusion setting in the Nvidia Control Panel for more realistic scene shading, along with a new SLI and PhysX configuration page. So, if you want to pair two GPUs in SLI mode and dedicate the third to PhysX, no problem. If you want to activate all three of your displays and then optimize for highest performance in that configuration—you’re golden.”