Acer Aspire 5745DG review

Although from the exterior it might not look that different from any other laptop, Acer’s 5745DG comes with hidden depths. Underneath the smart-looking lid, it has a stunning 3D display. To properly see 3D content, the laptop comes with a pair of active-shutter glasses. An infrared emitter hidden in the display bezel syncs the glasses to the screen, displaying alternating images to each eye and creating the 3D effect. The 15.6in LED-backlit panel has a rapid 120Hz refresh rate so each eye still sees 60 frames per second.

Although the visual effect is impressive, the amount of available content is small. Acer has included a 3D photo viewer and an application to convert files into pseudo-3D, but oddly the 5745DG doesn’t come with a Blu-Ray optical drive. Even if it did, the screen resolution is only 1,366×768, so you won’t be able to make the most of 3D blu-ray releases in Full HD (thin on the ground at present but likely to flood out next year).There are a few online video streams, but at first glance it seems that 3D gaming is the most suitable use for the display.

We haven’t seen many of nVidia’s 400m-series laptop graphics cards before, but the GeForce 425m used in the 5745DG shows what to expect from the rest of the range. As well as 3D Vision, the 400m-series cards support almost all the features of their desktop counterparts, such as DirectX 11, PhysX and CUDA acceleration (in supported programs like Photoshop). The 425m is only a mid-range chipset and managed an acceptable 28.8fps in our Call of Duty test, so it won’t play the latest games in high detail. Disastrously, switching to 3D massive increases the workload on the GPU. Call of Duty dropped to just 13fps, which is no longer playable.