Samsung’s Odyssey 3D monitor delivers great visuals, limited game support

Gamers of a certain age will remember a period roughly 15 years ago when the industry collectively decided stereoscopic 3D was going to be the next big thing in gaming. From Nvidia’s “3D Vision” glasses system to Nintendo’s glasses-free 3DS to Sony’s 3D TV aimed specifically at gamers, major gaming companies put a lot of effort into bringing a sense of real depth to the flat video game scenes of the day.

Unfortunately for those companies, the stereoscopic 3D gaming hype faded almost as quickly as it rose; by 2012, most companies were scaling back their stereoscopic investments in light of underwhelming public demand (case in point: Nintendo’s pivot to the 3D-free 2DS line of portables). And while some stray upstarts have tried to revive the stereoscopic gaming dream in the years since, the idea seemed destined to be a footnote in gaming tech history.

Apparently, nobody told Samsung. The company announced the Odyssey 3D earlier this year, promising a glasses-free “light-field display” that could “create lifelike 3D images from 2D content by using a lenticular lens on the front panel.” As a gamer with fond memories of the 3DS—and a general interest in seemingly doomed technology trends of all types—I was intrigued, to say the least.

After testing the retail version of the Samsung Odyssey 3D at Ars’ orbiting HQ for a few weeks, I can say that the monitor delivers a stunning stereoscopic experience that reflects how much display technology has advanced in the last 15 years. Unfortunately, the limited selection of compatible games makes it hard to recommend to any PC gamer that doesn’t have a “money is no object” budget to throw at its $2,000 MSRP.

A jaw-dropping 3D effect

Like previous glasses-free stereoscopic displays, the Odyssey 3D uses a thin, adjustable lenticular layer to direct slightly different images to each eye, resulting in a convincing sense of true depth that standard monitors can’t provide. The Odyssey 3D comes with a built-in eye-tracking camera at the top, which does a good job quickly adjusting that lenticular positioning even as you move your head outside of the “sweet spot” directly in front of the display’s center. When playing a stereoscopic game, you can also use keyboard shortcuts to adjust the apparent depth so it feels comfortable for your particular eyesight and interpupillary distance.

If your only experience with glasses-free stereoscopic 3D is the small, low-resolution display on the 3DS, the sheer impact of seeing a similar effect on the Odyssey 3D for the first time is hard to overstate. The overall impression is like looking into a magic diorama filled with animated characters come to life. The screen becomes merely the front panel through which you view this “magic box” scene, which seems to recede into the space behind the monitor in a way that can be a bit brain-breaking at first. After immersing yourself in the Odyssey 3D’s stereoscopic 3D for a while, though, going back to a 3D game projected on a flat 2D plane feels a bit washed out and lifeless.

Much of the Odyssey 3D’s stereoscopic impact comes down to its specs. A base 4K resolution and 165 Hz refresh rate means it can deliver a sharp and smooth 1080p image to each eye in stereoscopic mode, eliminating a lot of the blurriness and judder you might remember from the 3D displays of yesteryear. Add in a 27-inch diagonal display size that takes up a large portion of your field of vision (at desk distances), and it feels like you’ve been transported to an alternate reality where the industry has been consistently improving stereoscopic displays through over a decade of R&D.

While the stereoscopic effect was overall comfortable for long periods in my tests, my eyes did have  a bit of trouble focusing during occasional scenes where objects in the foreground end up obstructing the main game action in the background, such as errant blades of grass flitting in front of the camera in Stray. When this happens, the extreme difference in vergence between the foreground objects and the background characters right next to them on the screen can create a blurry, eye-crossing distraction. While this effect is rare and short in most games I tested, it can be very uncomfortable when it does occur.

Limited compatibility

As impressive as the stereoscopic gaming experience is on the Odyssey 3D, it’s also an experience that’s disappointingly limited to a handful of games at the moment. The Samsung Reality Hub app—which you have to use to launch any stereoscopic content—currently only supports 14 titles, ranging from some recent hits (Lies of P, Palworld) to retro classics (three remastered Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition games) to a few you’ve like never heard of (Wigmund, The First Berserker: Khazan).

Even if you somehow own all 14 of these titles, that still means your fancy new monitor’s best feature can only be used on a minuscule subset of your PC gaming library. That’s more than a bit galling in a monitor that costs two to four times as much as flat 2D displays with similar specs.

Using the required Samsung Reality app to even launch those few games is also an unnecessarily annoying experience, thanks to a bloated, overly busy stereoscopic front-end that caused my graphics card to spin up like a jet engine even before launching a game (Samsung recommends a GTX 3080 or higher to power the app and any stereoscopic games, but it didn’t complain about my GTX 2080). Even after awkwardly registering my monitor-compatible games through the app, I often found they simply wouldn’t launch in 3D through the app unless I reset my entire system, for some reason.

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