Today in DCC Workstation

3D Graphics Cards for DCC

Intro, Why Accelerate?, What to Look For, PCI vs. AGP

Entry-Level, Low-Cost, High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $300 Cards

nVidia RIVA TNT2 Ultra, Matrox Millenium G200 and G400, 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1, 3Dlabs Permedia3 Create!

Mid-Range, High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $1000 Cards

High-End, Maximum 3D Acceleration: Cards Over $1,000

3Dlabs Oxygen VX1

Featuring the 3Dlabs GLINT R3 workstation rasterization processor with the same Virtual Texture technology as the Permedia3 and 32 MB of high-speed SDRAM, the 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 delivers outstanding 2D performance and mid-range 3D performance at a very reasonable entry level price for digital content creation applications.

The Oxygen VX1 comes in both AGP or PCI bus configurations, has 32MB of unified SDRAM framebuffer, Z-buffer and texture memory, offers 1900 x 1200 maximum resolution or 2048x1536 double-buffered, and 32-bit Z 60Hz-120Hz screen refresh rates.The card has Pentium III-optimized PowerThreads SSE drivers, OpenGL 1.1/1.2, DirectX 6.1, Windows NT/ 95/98/2000, DDC2B support on all operating systems and multi-threaded support. The PowerThreads SSE drivers provide full Pentium III optimizations for single and multiple CPUs to maximize geometry throughput. The multithreaded architecture of PowerThreads SSE uses the power of your current system and allows you to scale geometry performance as more CPU processing power is added.

The Oxygen VX1 has single pass multi-texture capability, integrated 300MHz RAMDAC, a high-speed 128-bit memory interface, 7 independent DMA engines, an integrated SVGA controller, and PowerThreads SSE 1.1 ICD (1.2 Ready) OpenGL drivers with full Pentium III SSE optimizations and is multiprocessor system optimized. The texture engine provides for a 2048x2048x32 maximum individual texture size, single pass bump-mapping, per-pixel lighting, Gouraud shading, perspectively correct bilinear and trilinear filtering, perspectively correct per pixel MIP-mapping, dual bilinear mip-mapped textures in a single pass, volumetric rendering with up to 8-way filtering, source and destination alpha blending, fogging and depth cueing, anti-aliased lines and polygons, full-scene anti-aliasing, scissoring and stippling, overlay and stencil buffers, 32 bit Z-buffering, Softimage-compliant 8-bit double-buffered overlay planes, and GID Clipping.

The VX1 AGP board is AGP 2X and AGP 4X compatible and AGP Version 2.0 compliant. The PCI 32-bit 33/66 MHz Version 2.1 card will ship in 3Q99. The VX1 is multi-head capable and can drive up to 8 displays using multiple boards. It also has video bilinear filtered re-scaling, hardware YUV-RGB conversion, and hardware MPEG-2 motion compensation.

As with the Permedia3, the 3Dlabs Advanced Control Panel automatically optimizes the system configuration for each professional application. The MSRP for the Oxygen VX1 is $299 with street prices ranging around $200.

Lead on to the 3Dlabs Permedia3 Create!

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