Call Of Duty: Black Ops Gets The 3D Experience

So, along side Gran Turismo 5 and Killzone 3 another large AAA title gets 3D support. Yesterday, in a rather unexpected twist, Activision announced that Call Of Duty: Black Ops will come with 3D enabled upon release. If of course you have the right TV or monitor that can handle it.

"Development of stereoscopic 3D began as an R&D project, but once we saw what the technology brought to the Call of Duty experience, what a great fit and how immersive it was, we knew that we had to develop it for Black Ops," said Mark Lamia, Treyarch studio head.”

"We made sure the experience is seamless for gamers to use with a simple menu option to enable stereoscopic 3D or disable it at any time whether playing in the single player campaign, multiplayer or Zombies."

To play in 3D PC gamers will need a monitor that is capable of handling a 120Hz refresh rate, be that LCD or even an aging CRT – but one that is still up to the task, along with a pair of NVIDIA 3D Vision active-shutter glasses, and a NVIDIA GPU.

Naturally, console owners will need a HDTV branded ‘3D Ready’ if you happen to live in the UK, or a similarly compatible monitor if you happen to have one of those to spare.

There’s obviously no word on what resolution the game renders at in 3D at this point, although I’m willing to bet that it will be even more sub-HD than the 1024x600 framebuffer makeup of the standard 2D build if they choose to render two separate frames (one for each eye). Another scenario is that the developers have chosen to use a depth buffer, plus pixel shift approach, ala Crysis 2 to achieve the effect, needing only a fraction of GPU power that otherwise would be required.

However, the first hands-on report of the game running in 3D seems to hint at the former. Although we should find out for sure soon enough.