Odyssey 3D Review: Samsung Pulled It Off, What 3D Always Should Have Been

After testing this new Odyssey 3D monitor from Samsung for about 2 weeks, I can say this right off the bat. They pulled it off. To put it simply, it’s a “glasses free” 3D monitor that Just Works™. As if every previous attempt at 3D was a proof-of-concept, and this is the first one that actually works as advertised. It really is that good. This is probably gonna be a long review, but the TLDR of it is that ghosting is practically zero, it’s 4K 165Hz, so crisp and smooth, the head-tracking is spot-on, and the software is super solid as well. Of course, the thing just launched, and there are a couple nitpick things I’ll get into, but the gist of it is that this is what 3D always should have been.

While 3D with-no-glasses is not exactly new, Acer launched a 3D gaming monitor last year (with similar specs to this), and there have been previous attempts, like the Nintendo 3DS, the Odyssey 3D is above and beyond what you might have seen before. The biggest takeaway is that this is 3D with no compromises. When you press the button to toggle to 3D mode, the image simply turns 3D, with practically nothing else changing. Since you aren’t wearing glasses, the picture doesn’t become darker and essentially feels just like a standard 2D picture, just in 3D. It’s hard to describe how significant of an improvement this new generation of 3D is without seeing it (with your own two eyes), and taking a photo with your phone is near impossible, but I’ll try my best.

To begin with, Samsung is pushing this as a gaming monitor, and with good reason. The kit costs around $2,000, and gamers are typically the market with that kinda scratch. When I first heard the price announced, I almost didn’t even wanna buy it, cause that seemed pretty steep for a 27″ display, but I was completely wrong. Surely, over time, the technology will become more affordable, but this is the first 3D monitor that actually works, so I can understand the premium price. Samsung has launched with a total of 14 officially supported games. It’s an eclectic mix of titles, but includes some heavy hitters like Lies of P, Palworld, and the whole Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition Trilogy. The “halo” launch title is The First Berserker: Khazan, and Samsung worked closely with the developer, early on, to ensure full support for the 3D monitor, including the head-tracking feature (essentially like VR, without wearing anything).

In The First Berserker: Khazan, you get native, developer-made, 3D and head-tracking that is nearly flawless. It simply looks amazing, and a significant improvement over what I recall with older technology on the PC, namely Nvidia 3D Vision. I tested a few other of the supported games, and it seems like they mostly just added the 3D support and not the full integration that Khazan got, but it gives me hope Samsung can work with more developers to get this level of quality. Palworld looked, and played, great, easily getting 120 FPS at 4K on an Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. I tried Stray, as well, and the 3D implementation here was nearly perfect. Samsung definitely picked some odd games to launch with, including Epic Mickey and a SpongeBob game, but I feel like this gives it a nice mix.

Watching 3D videos are well supported, this is not just for gaming. The Samsung software, Reality Hub, can support two modes. Either accepting a SBS (side-by-side) 3D signal, or taking any standard 4K signal and converting it to 3D using AI algorithms. As far as I can tell, the SBS mode works flawlessly. I tested images, videos, and games, and everything seemed to work fine out-of-the-box. For playing movies, you don’t need any specific media player, if you have a standard SBS MP4/MKV file, you can just load it in VLC (or your favorite player), go fullscreen, and click one button to toggle the 3D. It Just Works™. Even 3D Blu-ray can work, directly from the disc, with a little manual setup. I really couldn’t find anything that didn’t run, though outside of the official content it does require some research to get it working.

For non-3D content, which is obviously most of what you’d find on the internet, Samsung Reality Hub has the AI-powered 2D-to-3D conversion feature. This works on literally any app that can go full screen with a 4K signal. Meaning any video playback works, even on the web with YouTube. Samsung’s implementation here is good, and as long as you don’t leave the full screen mode, you can still click to other videos, scrub around the timeline, switch quality setting for YouTube, and there are no glitches. Granted, it is a 3D conversion, so the quality is nowhere near native 3D, but it’s a nice option considering the vast majority of random videos are not gonna be in 3D.

What’s kinda crazy is that this feature works on literally any full screen app. I was able to play in 3D with Nvidia GeForce NOW and basically every PC game was supported. It did look nice, after adjusting settings, but it was still conversion, on top of streaming, so came with some latency and quality issues. That said, it’s a decent stopgap for games that aren’t supported in 3D, and may never get a patch or update to enable it.

Retro 2D games also work with this conversion method, and the AI can handle the performance (trying this on new AAA games locally is a bit too intensive). Adding 3D to a pixel art game is a hit-or-miss, but can work well with the right game. I was able to get good results from Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium, and the “virtual” arcade felt like it was made for 3D.

Surprisingly, emulators seem to work, at least Citra does, since it can output SBS 3D.

Another trick I discovered was that you can play more games through Reality Hub than the official list (currently at 14 games). In the interface, where you choose the path to the game executable, it seems possible to force it to load some other game, and I did get it fully working with replacing the path to Stray with Still Wakes the Deep. My assumption is that Samsung is creating profiles for these games, similar to what Nvidia used to do with their 3D driver, and games by the same developer or on the same engine can work. That said, I tried this with a couple other games and it mostly just crashes the software, so perhaps I got lucky with Still Wakes the Deep. This is not a completely reliable method.

For games that simply don’t have an official 3D mode, there are still various methods for getting them running. I’m working on my own open-source shader that can convert hundreds of games to 3D, including some big ones like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. There are even mods for specific games to get geometry-based 3D (e.g. not a conversion) which gets fairly close to a native 3D implementation. It’s really hard to say exactly how many games are supported with these aftermarket methods, but I would estimate it’s easily over 500, or perhaps close to 1,000, but it’s difficult to verify that number of games, so I doubt anyone knows for sure. And one other thing, that I saved for last, is that the full screen AI-conversion even works in the web browser itself. So you can press F11 on the keyboard while in Chrome (or Firefox, if you prefer) and literally any website can be converted into 3D. Reddit, X, Facebook, whatever, and all the images and videos are just 3D. To be fair, text is not completely readable, and I wouldn’t want to type or post content like this, but if you’re doomscrolling, this is a neat trick.

I’ve been into 3D for going on 20-something years, and I can confidently say that this is the first stereo display I’ve tested that works without compromise. It looks amazing, and you really don’t trade much to display the 3D. It’s not necessary to wear glasses, the 3D is comfortable, and the software works surprisingly solid for a product that launched 2 weeks ago. This really is the next-generation of 3D, and it’s difficult to understand how massive of an improvement this Odyssey 3D monitor has made without seeing it first-hand. Hopefully Samsung can get this kit into Best Buy, or their own Samsung Experience Stores, cause people are really gonna need to see this for themselves. But if you like 3D, and feel confident taking a $2,000 gamble, I can assure you that this is it. Samsung pulled it off.