NVIDIA And Asus Launch "3D PC" Category With Three New Machines

It simply had to happen at some point. There's 3D cinemas, 3D HDTVs, and now, the 3D PC is upon us. NVIDIA and Asus are teaming up to make an early push into a market that will almost definitely explode over the coming months and years, laying down a few ground rules about what it takes to call a new PC a "3D PC." We never imagined that we would need an industry standard definition for 3D PCs, but here we are in that very spot.


As NVIDIA looks to push 3D into the PC gaming realm with their 3D Vision technologies, they've come to Acer to showcase three new machines. These three machines, as you would guess, are the first three to be classified as "3D PCs" by NVIDIA's definition.

By that definition, a 3D PC is a desktop or notebook PC that meets the following minimum requirements:

• Includes a pair of 3D active-shutter glasses (like the 3D Vision kit from NVIDIA), the only solution to provide full resolution 3D to each eye.
• A 120Hz 3D-capable display in the form of a desktop LCD monitor, a 3D projector, a 3D TV, or a notebook PC with an integrated 3D-capable LCD.
• A discrete graphics processor (like a GeForce GPU from NVIDIA) that is capable of delivering high definition imagery to the 3D display

Basically, NVIDIA wants to make sure that you're using 3D Vision and their GPUs for your 3D movie watching and gaming, though we're sure more PCs will come along that support 3D without meeting these qualifications. In fact, the MSI Wind Top AE2420 is proof of that. At any rate, the three new machines used to kick this off are the Asus G51Jx-EE notebook, the EeeTOP ET2400 all-in-one desktop PC and the Asus CD5390 gaming desktop. Details are scarce about these machines right now, as we suspect they were finalized just recently in order to help NVIDIA launch this push. We suspect fuller specifications will be available soon--NVIDIA clearly doesn't want anyone waiting around to enjoy 3D content on their next PC.