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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
Permedia3 Create!
Though
not yet available in many workstation configurations, 3Dlabs
new Permedia3 Create! card is bound to start showing up soon, if the popularity
of the previous Permedia2 chip is anything to go by.
Permedia3 Create! provides 100% hardware acceleration for Windows 95/98
with OpenGL and Direct3D, as well as Windows NT. It also provides complete
hardware acceleration for all Direct3D applications under Windows 2000,
enabling use of the operating system and 3D API without compromise. The
card is fully optimized for Pentium III and 3DNow! to maximize 3D geometry
and lighting performance and contains 32MB SDRAM graphics memory.
Permedia3 Create! has a full demand-paged virtual texture sub-system in
hardware, using on-board graphics memory to cache huge textures stored
in main system memory. The AGP 2X (with texture execute) card allows seamless
manipulation of up to 256MB of textures. This Virtual Texturing provides
up to 30 times the capacity and efficiency of normal AGP texturing, without
the usual quality loss from texture compression. The processor also supports
accelerated volumetric rendering, bump-mapping with per-pixel lighting,
dual bilinear mip-mapping and triple texture blending in a single cycle.
Permedia3 Create! has a 300MHz RAMDAC to enable flicker-free high-resolution
displays at resolutions of up to 2048x1536. With a full 32MB of on-board
memory and Virtual Texturing, 3 million pixel displays can be processed
and displayed with 32-bit color, 32-bit textures and full 32-bit Z buffer.
Permedia3 Create! also has the flexibility to mix pixel formats for the
use of 8-bit stencil buffers and GID planes.
3Dlabs has written a unique driver to tune the graphics display for maximum
performance in any specific software application. Selecting the target
application by name or typing it into the control panel automatically
tunes the card for any application. If an application isn't listed, custom
entries can easily be created for optimal performance.
The MSRP for the Permedia3 Create! Card is $229.00.
Go
on to Mid-Range Cards
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