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fatslob-:O said:
JoeTheBro said:

First off it's practically impossible for 3D to take more than double the resources. In a hypothetical situation you could just have two 360s (or any other system really) and feed each the same controller input. I'm of course assuming the two games stay perfectly synced.

If each 360 was programed to have the camera slightly shifted to the side, one left and the other right, the outputs would be perfect for 3D. If you used active shutter glasses then the TV would alternate between each 360 twice a game frame. So if the two 360 outputs were 1080p at 30fps, the TV would be displaying a 1080p at 60fps video. If you used a passive technique like the 3DS each view would lose half of its pixels and the video would only be 1080p at 30fps. This would be perfect stereoscopic 3D with zero optimizations, and it uses 2X the power.

 

However lots of calculations don't depend on the camera's location, at least relative to the other camera. Practically everything except the GPUs are calculating identical information in the two 360 example. So this in itself gets 3D using less than 2X the computational power.

Some of the GPU calculations as well can be shared between viewpoints, but this really depends on how well the dev optimizes the code. Thus it's between 1 and 2 times the computation power, depending on the 3D techniques used.

@Bold Yet games in the benchmark like STALKER COP takes 4X more performance to push a 3D frame and modern warfare 2 is taking as much as 3X the power to also push a frame. It's not impossible for a game to take more than twice the power to output 3D since video memory space is also a limiting factor to performance. 

I think your understimating how demanding stereoscopic 3D is. 

Can I see some games where stereoscopic 3D only takes 70% more power then ? 

Guess I need to again say fps!=computational power.