Through Active Shutter Glasses : Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition

NVIDIA recently released beta 280.19 drivers and with that came support for Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. Now, Street Fighter IV worked with previous drivers as evident by this video on YouTube, but NVIDIA’s touting the game as “3D Vision Ready” with the latest release.

When booting up, the bottom right of the screen usually told you how well NVIDIA thinks the game works with 3D Vision. This is the first game I have that instead of saying Excellent, it says 3D Vision Ready. That’s the highest indicator they have now in terms of how effective 3D is on the game. If you go to NVIDIA’s webite, you can see that there are a few more games, both older and new, that now have the 3D Vision Ready label as well as a ton of other games NVIDIA has rated.

Back when it was released, Street Fighter IV played OK with 3D Vision, but I had issues when the characters were in their intro animation or doing some super move as a lot of the graphics popped out of the screen way too much causing great eye strain in trying to focus on the image. The regular view of the fighting wasn’t bad and the depth added with 3D enhanced the already great graphics of the game on the PC.

So how does Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition hold up now that it’s being touted as 3D Vision Ready?

It. Is. Awesome. Let me say, I loved the look of Street Fighter IV, but adding high quality 3D to it just takes it to a whole new level. Gone are the eye straining super move animations and introductions. In place is some greatly improved 3D performance that is downright perfect.

I’m playing the game on an Intel i7-2600K with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with 4GB of ram and using NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 video card. With all the options on maximum and 4x AA, the game played smoothly without any hiccups. Considering it has to do double duty and render frames twice, it did a great job at keeping the game at a constant 60FPS. For the monitor, I used the ASUS VG236H and ran the game at 1920x1080.

Let’s start just with the HUD. From the EX bars to the health meters, they look like they are floating on the screen. As you fight and move around, they stay on top of the action.

In a plane beneath it, sits the two fighters. 3D Vision does well in keeping the characters in this area making very little items pop out, but when they do they are used effectively. It’s not overly used thus not doing anything to strain the eyes.

Beneath the fighters sits multiple levels of depth for the background, depending on the object in the scene. The backgrounds in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition looked great in regular 2D, but that 3D depth effect really brings it new life. One some levels, such as the desert base, you’ll see an occasional lens flare that floats above everything else, which is a pretty cool effect. With all the things that can happen in the background, the 3D effect really improves on the impressive backgrounds already and sometimes I found myself just watching some of the things happening behind my fighters.

Thankfully, all the animations when doing a super move or most of the victory animations are contained within the monitor so that issue I had with Street Fighter IV has been mostly eradicated with the latest drivers. I could only take playing Street Fighter IV for short periods of time because of how the super moves and intros would just hurt my eyes because they popped out so far from the monitor. There are still some left that need adjusting such as Evil Ryu’s victory animation, but for the most part the game’s 3D is great in these areas.

For me, the game looks so much better with 3D Vision working. The brighter colors of the game help offset the dimming nature of the glasses and I had no problems seeing a good, clear picture. I could not see any ghosting whatsoever, but your mileage may vary depending on the monitor.

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition was such a treat to play with 3D Vision. The effect really brought forth some great visuals when playing the game and I could sit and play for long periods of time using the active shutter glasses. It definitely deserves the 3D Vision Ready tag and it’s 3D quality is a great improvement over the previous game. I’m really happy to see the latest Street Fighter on the PC and even happier that NVIDIA and Capcom really brought forth a high quality experience when using the 3D Vision setup. It’s one game I’d highly recommend if you’re looking for a good 3D game to play with.