3Dlabs Permedia 3 Create!

The Rest of the Card

The Permedia 3 Create!, as the name implies (or is intended to imply), is targeted towards the web professional market. Throughout this article we’ve referred to that very market as the professional by day, gamer by night market, however that can hold many meanings depending what you plan on using your system for. The rest of the Permedia 3, outside of the key specifications and strengths discussed earlier, are what you would come to expect from a card being released in the current "generation" of graphics accelerators.

A 300MHz integrated RAMDAC accompanies the Permedia 3 in order to provide a competitive yet cost effective solution that is able to tailor to the needs of those users with budgets for larger monitors. The truly high-end users wanting to take advantages of resolutions above and beyond the 1600 x 1200 mark most users have only been dreaming of may find the 300MHz RAMDAC somewhat lacking in the ability to deliver a sharp picture. However out of this class of graphics accelerators, there isn’t a single one that is a truly "high quality" solution for driving the 2048 x 1536 resolution. If you’re lucky enough to have a monitor that supports such a resolution, you may want to consider a more expensive card to suit your needs as no sub $300 graphics accelerator will grant you that wish.

The Permedia 3 comes standard with 32MB of SDRAM and passive heatsink on the chip itself as well as the card’s sole voltage regulator. Naturally there is hardware support for 32-bit color rendering, including support for a 32-bit Z buffer, a topic which is much more important to users of high-end applications than gamers looking for a sharper frag. The majority of the Permedia 3’s features are obviously geared towards the professional in mind, with just enough attention paid to the gamer to prevent the card from being completely ruled out by the gaming population.

The topic of bump mapping, originally brought out into the eyes of the public with the Matrox G400’s support for Environment Map Bump Mapping, is also present in the discussion of the Permedia 3 as the chip supports a form of Bump Mapping known as Dot 3. Dot 3 Bump Mapping is allegedly superior in quality to that of Environment Map Bump Mapping, both of which are obviously greater in quality than the embossed bump mapping that most competing cards provide support for. According to 3Dlabs’ documentation, the Permedia 3 supports both Dot 3 and Embossed bump mapping. For more information on Bump Mapping, see AnandTech’s coverage of the Matrox Millennium G400.