With actual 3D games scheduled to take the Playstation 3 by storm in the near future, Sony's Ian Bickerstaff and Simon Benson opened up to other developers to introduce and explain their process for converting WipEout HD from 2D to 3D. Digital Foundry happened to catch a lot of information about the process during the presentation.

During the presentation, they outlined best practices regarding v-sync to prevent frame tearing, defining depth, and managing timing. Hit up the source if you want all the (relatively dry) details, but in the end it turns out doing a 3D conversion for WipEout HD wasn't all that difficult. That's good news for developers who wish to convert some of their projects to 3D.

On the down side, it appears the PS3 currently contains two 1280x720 frame buffers in a top/bottom arrangement for each eye, which are automatically converted to HDMI 3D and output at 59.94hz. This is far from the 1080p at 100hz Sony was talking up long ago, which means developers may need to knock the resolution and framerate down to get their existing games running in 3D due to the additonal computational overhead. Game engines optimized for 3D from the start will likely endure far less overhead, and could run at likely run at higher settings.

[Source: Digital Foundry]

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