Unreal Universal 3D

UU3D can output stereo 3D directly to a screen — no headset, no SteamVR or OpenXR install — as a third runtime alongside OpenVR/OpenXR. The game renders in stereo through its normal render pipeline; instead of submitting to a VR compositor, the two eyes are woven into the game's own backbuffer in your chosen 3D format and presented normally. Works on 3D TVs, 3D projectors, Interlaced, LeiaSR, AR glasses, Frame Sequential, and plain monitors via anaglyph output.

Download

Grab the latest nightly build from github.com/oneup03/UU3D/releases/latest — download UU3D.zip and extract it anywhere.

Ready-made game profiles live at github.com/oneup03/UU3D-Profiles — import them via Import Config below.

Injecting with UU3DI

1. Launch the game, then open UU3DI and select the game's process from the running-process list.
2. Optionally Import Config to load a profile zip. The zip's filename must exactly match the game's exe name (e.g. Game-Win64-Shipping.zip for Game-Win64-Shipping.exe) or it won't be associated with the game. If the zip contains a DLL plugin you'll be asked to confirm — only accept plugins from sources you trust.
3. Optionally adjust the settings UU3DI shows for the selected game before injecting — they're saved to the game's config.txt and take effect at injection.
4. Hit Inject. From there, everything is driven from the in-game UU3D menu — press Insert to open or close it (rebindable via the menu key setting).

The Unreal tab in one minute

3D Display composites whatever stereo pair the Unreal tab produces, so three options there matter most:

• Rendering Method — how the stereo pair is generated:
  • Native Stereo (default) — the engine renders both eyes every frame. Cleanest image and no eye lag, but full double-render GPU cost.
  • Synchronized Sequential — both eyes are rendered on the same game tick as two sequential full renders, then presented together. Same double-render GPU cost as Native Stereo; the compatibility path for games where the engine's native stereo pass misbehaves.
  • Alternating/AFR — each engine frame renders one eye, presented as they come. Still a full render per eye — no cheaper overall — and the two eyes show different ticks, so fast motion shows eye lag.
  • Alternate Frame Warping — the only method that actually cuts GPU cost: one eye is rendered per frame and the other is reprojected by PureDark's AFW plugin using depth and motion vectors. DX12 only (DX11 falls back to AFR) and wants in-game DLSS enabled so depth and motion vectors are available; the first moments after injection run Synced Sequential while AFW warms up.
• Ghosting Fix — gives each eye its own temporal-history (TAA) view state so the alternating-eye methods don't smear one eye's history into the other. Watch its status badge; leave Bootstrap Separate View States off unless the badge never reaches "active".
• Native Stereo Fix — for titles whose engine won't produce a correct second eye under Native Stereo: runs an extra capture pass each frame to obtain the other eye. Only applies to the Native Stereo method (the Synced/AFR/AFW paths ignore it), and turns itself off for the session if the extra pass crashes.

This page walks through the 3D Display tab in the UU3D menu, top to bottom.

Output Mode

Pick how the stereo pair is packed into the screen image:

• Side by Side, Top and Bottom — for 3D TVs/projectors set to the matching SBS/TAB mode, and for most VR video players.
• Row Interlaced, Column Interlaced, Checkerboard — for passive 3D displays. These patterns are drawn in real display pixels, so any render resolution stays line-exact — but the game must run borderless fullscreen at the display's native resolution (any scaling applied after us breaks the pattern; you'll get an on-screen warning if a mismatch is detected).
• LeiaSR (SR display) — glasses-free Leia/Dimenco panels. Needs a running SRService (D3D11/D3D12); falls back to Side by Side otherwise.
• Frame Packed 720p60 / 1080p24 / 1080p60 — HDMI 1.4 "3D" for 3D TVs. Emits Top-and-Bottom with the HDMI blanking gap and auto-applies the matching display timing (NVIDIA/AMD, or a CRU-preconfigured mode), which is what makes the TV show its 3D icon. The timing reverts on exit. Intel GPUs need the mode pre-added in CRU.
• Dual Display / Dual Display (Flip) — send one eye to each of two monitors arranged side by side (Flip vertically mirrors the left eye for mirror-style rigs).
• Katanga (shared texture) — publishes the pair as a shared texture for VR and Frame Sequential viewers (Katanga.exe / VRScreenCap / NV3D-Glass / WibbleWobbleInjector); launch any app in any order. Forces the game into a normal window and shows a flat left-eye preview locally.
• Anaglyph (Red/Cyan, Green/Magenta, Blue/Amber, plus Dubois / Deghosted / Compromise variants) — for colored 3D glasses on any ordinary screen.

Swap Eyes — flips left/right if the depth looks inverted (also flips the interlace phase for passive displays).

VSync Override — No-Tear Fast (default), Force On, or Use In-Game Setting. No-Tear Fast overrides the game's own VSync: presents run uncapped at sync interval 0 with the DXGI tearing flag stripped, so a flip-model swapchain (all DX12 games) still flips on vblank only — tear-free and both eyes of an AFR-family pair land every refresh. The frame cap (t.MaxFPS) is managed automatically: twice the display refresh under Synced Sequential / AFR / AFW, native refresh under Native Stereo. (DX11 exclusive-fullscreen can still tear at interval 0 — use Force On there, or run borderless windowed.)

Force SDR Output — HDR output washes out the 3D modes and disables color correction. Leave this on unless you specifically want to experiment with HDR passthrough.

Output is always held at the display's native resolution. To lower GPU cost, turn down the in-game resolution (or resolution scale) — that path is upscaled correctly and won't break interlaced/checkerboard modes.

Full-width side-by-side panels (32:9)

Some 3D displays are a single ultra-wide panel — e.g. 3840×1080 (32:9), where each eye is a full 16:9 half. When Side by Side is selected on a panel wider than ~2.5:1, UU3D detects this automatically and switches to Native Render + Upscale: the game is told its window is one eye wide (via a client-rect spoof), so it renders each eye at native 16:9 instead of being squeezed to 32:9, and the two eyes are composited back across the full panel. The result is full per-eye sharpness with no configuration. It's a no-op on ordinary half-width SbS displays (1920×1080), where the display itself stretches each half.

Because the engine believes its window is one eye wide, the game's UI, the UU3D menu and the mouse cursor are all authored at that perceived per-eye size and composited into each eye — see the limitation in Compatibility notes for the rare title that ignores this.

3D Calibration

Three settings form one calibrated set, saved together per game:

• Depth — eye separation (how strong the 3D is).
• Convergence — the distance that sits exactly on the screen plane. Things nearer than this pop out toward you; things farther sit behind the screen.
• Reference FoV — the field of view at which Depth and Convergence were dialed in (recommended to set this to gameplay FoV).

Separation then auto-scales with the game's live FoV (always on), so zooming or aiming down sights keeps the perceived depth constant. The game's FoV is never overridden — only the stereo shear is injected into its own projection.

Hotkeys (hold to repeat): Ctrl+F3 / F4 depth −/+, Ctrl+F5 / F6 convergence −/+. Ctrl+F12 (or the Take 3D Screenshot button at the top of the menu) saves the composited stereo pair — the game, its own HUD, the crosshair and the stereo cursor at the current convergence, with only the UU3D menu hidden for the capture and both eyes valid even under AFR — as two PNGs under <persistent>/flat3d_screenshots/, regardless of the on-screen output mode: a canonical parallel-view (sbs_<timestamp>.png, left|right) and a cross-view companion (…_crossview.png, right|left) for cross-eyed free-viewing. The capture spans the 1–2 presents it takes to refresh both eyes with the menu hidden, so the menu briefly blinks off on screen as the shot is taken.

Depth Source

The scene-depth source for Adaptive Crosshair, HUD Depth, and Auto-Convergence:

• Per-Draw Capture (default) — a safe, API-level capture of the game's rendering. Works on most titles, but it's blind to depth the game allocates once at load time; in that case the depth features simply stay flat.
• Engine Pool (SceneDepthZ) — reads the engine's own scene depth from its render-target pool. Fixes titles that allocate depth at load (e.g. SMT V: Vengeance), but it installs an engine hook that crashes a few games (e.g. Jedi: Survivor). Enable it per-game. (Replaces the old Use Engine Depth Buffer toggle; saved configs carry over.)
• DSV Observer (D3D12 only) — watches depth-stencil views and resource barriers at the API level and snapshots the live scene depth each frame. Installs no engine hook (safe where Engine Pool crashes) and sees depth allocated at any time (works where Per-Draw stays flat). A status line under the combo shows what the observer is tracing.
• DLSS Depth (D3D12 only) — snapshots the exact depth the game feeds DLSS, captured from the DLSS call itself (no engine hook, no plugin). Only has data while DLSS is enabled in the game's graphics settings; works in any rendering method and is the natural choice when playing with AFW.

Auto-Convergence

Automatically pulls the screen plane just in front of the nearest significant object so its pop-out never exceeds Target Disparity (a fraction of screen width). Your manual Convergence acts as the ceiling; turning this off snaps back to it.

• Smoothing — how gently the convergence follows depth changes.
• Min Convergence — never pulls the plane closer than this (raise it if nearby objects drag the whole scene too deep).
• Log Samples — diagnostic logging.

Separation auto-scales with the pull-in, so the background stays exactly where you calibrated it. This reads the engine depth buffer (see above).

Crosshair

Put the aiming reticle at the right depth so it lands on the target instead of floating on the screen plane.

• Mode — Off, Game Crosshair (re-projects the game's own reticle to the aimed depth by extracting a small region of its UI), or Laser Sight (a separate depth-aware dot, classic 3D-Vision style).
• Adaptive Depth — read the aim depth from the depth buffer. When it's unavailable the Static Depth slider is used instead.
• Game Crosshair: Region Radius (size of the extracted center patch — HUD inside it rides along) and Region Center Y (its vertical position).
• Laser Sight: Dot Size and Dot Color.

GUI

Controls the depth of the game's 2D UI (health bars, menus, markers), the UU3D menu, and the mouse cursor.

HUD Depth Mode

• Flat (GUI Depth) — the whole UI sits on one plane at GUI Depth.
• Depth-Adaptive (Auto-Classified) — UI that moves with the camera (waypoints, nameplates, floating markers) is placed at the scene depth beneath it, while static HUD stays flat. It learns which is which as you look around; needs a working scene depth source. See tuning below.
• World Markers (Auto-Detected) — hooks the engine's world→screen projection and puts UI at each marker's true 3D position. Coverage depends on how the game drives its HUD.

Full-Screen UI Coverage % — when the game's UI covers at least this much of the screen, HUD/crosshair depth flattens automatically. This catches full-screen menus (map, inventory, controller menus) that don't show a mouse cursor. Raise it if a busy gameplay HUD trips it; lower it if a full-screen menu isn't caught; 0 disables the coverage check (paused-game detection still applies).

Depth-Adaptive tuning (only shown in that mode):

• Icon Region Radius — how far around a detected moving element the depth shift spreads, so a whole icon and its text move as one piece.
• Show Classification (debug) — tints the HUD so you can tune it: red = treated as world (gets scene depth), green = treated as flat HUD. Look around to train it.
• False-Positive Rejection — stops animated-but-fixed HUD (a spinning minimap, gauges) and menu backdrops from being mistaken for world-tracking UI:
  • Suppress Permanent Panels — UI that's on-screen every frame (a minimap disc, a gauge cluster) is forced flat, along with a small halo around it. Panel Occupancy sets how "always there" it must be; Panel Halo grows the flat margin; Marker Safe Zone W/H is a central box where this suppression is turned off, so real markers near the middle are never flattened.
  • Reject Large UI Fills — a big solid region of UI (a menu backdrop or blurred scrim) is never a marker — a marker is a small island. This forces such fills flat immediately, even in the center. Fill Radius sets how large "big" is; Fill Coverage how solidly filled it must be.
  • Translation / Rotation Gate, Translation Floor — how much motion evidence is required before UI is called "world." Raise the gates for fewer false positives (may miss subtle markers); the floor ignores tiny camera drift.
  • Exclusion Zones — up to four rectangles you mark as always-flat HUD (center + half-size in screen fractions, 0..1). Set a zone's half-size to 0 to disable it.

GUI Depth — depth of the flat UI plane. UU3D Menu Depth — depth of the UU3D menu. Depths are relative to convergence: 1.0 = the screen plane (no shift), below 1 pops out, above 1 sits behind. Layers scale down as they shift so nothing is pushed off-screen.

Stereo Cursor — replaces the flat system cursor (which the OS would draw at screen depth in one eye only) with a proper per-eye cursor whenever the game shows one: None, GUI Depth (at the UI plane), or Geometry (Under Cursor) (lands on the scene surface right under the tip; needs a scene depth source, and falls back to GUI depth over full-screen menus). Cursor Size sets its size.

The UU3D menu's font size is set from the main UU3D menu → Configuration → Font Size.

Head Tracking (OpenTrack)

Point OpenTrack's UDP over network output at 127.0.0.1:<port> (default 4242). Two independent gains:

• Look Sensitivity — adds head yaw/pitch/roll on top of the game's camera (TrackIR-style).
• Parallax Sensitivity — shifts the eye origin with head x/y/z for a fishtank / head-coupled effect (natural on SR displays).

Use OpenTrack's own Center hotkey to zero the neutral pose. Off by default and a pure no-op when disabled.

Color Correction (SDR)

Adjust lift / gamma / gain plus an S-curve contrast, applied as a post step in the weave shader — handy for compensating for the dimming/tint of glasses or reducing crosstalk. Enable, then adjust S-Curve Contrast and the per- channel Lift / Gamma / Gain sliders. SDR output only (ignored under HDR).

Advanced

• HDR Paper White (nits) — reference white used when converting HDR frames for anaglyph output.
• D3D12 Debug Layer Log — diagnostic logging of D3D12 validation messages for depth-feature crashes (needs the debug layer enabled on the game's device; see the in-menu tooltip). D3D12 only.

Compatibility notes

• Synchronized Sequential shows only complete, matched pairs: both eyes come from the same game state (a pair lock holds the first eye until its partner arrives), and eye identity is measured per frame rather than inferred — no cross-state judder, no inverted eyes, at roughly half the effective framerate (each world state is rendered twice).
• Alternating/AFR works with a per-eye cache: each frame one eye is fresh and the other is one frame old. Fast motion shows the usual AFR shimmer.
• Alternate Frame Warping (AFW) renders one eye and reprojects the other from color + depth + motion vectors — near-2x scene performance with same-state eyes. D3D12 only, needs DLSS enabled in-game (raw-buffer fallback exists) and the real PDAFWPlugin.dll beside UEVRBackend.dll; without it, AFW falls back to plain AFR. Pair it with the DLSS Depth source so the depth features read the same depth the warp uses.
• Native Stereo Fix titles are handled (eye layout follows the headset logic), including modular DLL builds and engines with customized scene-view-family layouts (Returnal, Hellblade 2).
• Games that need AHUD UI compatibility (UI drawn via the viewport render target, e.g. P3R) can look overly transparent — see UI Invert Alpha and UI Color Gate on the main Compatibility page.
• Recommended: add -nohmd to the game's launch arguments. Titles with their own native HMD/OpenXR stereo path can misbehave when UU3D drives stereo — either the game HUD/UI disappears (e.g. Stellar Blade), or the game tries to start up SteamVR/an HMD on launch (e.g. Storybook). -nohmd forces the game to mono so UU3D drives stereo cleanly — add -noxr as well if needed.
• On a full-width (32:9) SbS panel (see Full-width side-by-side panels above), a title that draws its UI across the entire physical panel rather than the per-eye area — e.g. FF7 Rebirth, whose menu composites full-width — can't be cropped down to a single eye, so that UI is stretched across the pair. The in-game HUD, which respects the perceived per-eye size, is unaffected, and standard 16:9 displays are never affected. There is no per-game fix for this today.
• Both UE4 (float) and UE5 (double-precision) projection paths are supported.
• Quick sanity check: Side by Side with Depth 0 gives two identical halves; raise Depth and nearer-than-convergence objects show crossed disparity (use Swap Eyes if it's inverted).

Thanks to

• praydog — creator and principal author of UEVR, the injection and stereo-rendering framework this mode is built on.
• joeyhodge - got more recent UE 5.x games working
• PureDark - created Alternate Frame Warping
• The UEVR contributors whose work this builds on: narknon, keton, cursey, mark-mon, mrbelowski, npt-1707, Raicuparta, Anton-4, and markmontec.
• MidlifeCrisis / EvilKermitReturns — for early exploratory work on Unreal Engine stereo 3D that shaped several of the design decisions applied here.