3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 PCI

Superior Drivers

3Dlabs has always been able to deliver very solid and stable drivers with their products, and the Oxygen GVX1 is no exception. Like the VX1, the Oxygen GVX1 makes use of a technology with their drivers that 3Dlabs likes to call PowerThreads SSE.

The PowerThreads SSE OpenGL drivers that ship with the GVX1 help performance under multiprocessor configurations. While the Gamma G1 geometry processor is capable of 3 billion floating point operations per second, noticeably more than a Pentium III 500, when placed in a system with dual or even quad CPU configurations, there may be a need to balance the geometry and lighting load between the geometry processor and the host CPUs, and this situation is where the multithreaded PowerThreads SSE drivers come into play.

The addition of the SSE onto the PowerThreads name is a result of SSE optimizations in the drivers themselves.

The driver utilities themselves are quite useful as they provide you with options to control the state of V-Sync (enabled/disabled) as well as turn on or off optimizations for specific applications. The resulting performance boost after optimizations for a particular application are turned on can be noticeable, depending on the usage patterns.

3Dlabs already has beta Windows 2000 drivers available for the Oxygen GVX1 and they are committed to providing the GVX1 with full support under Windows 2000 upon its release.

The Test

All tests were conducted at 1024 x 768 x 32-bit color at a 75Hz refresh rate. The latest drivers for each video card were used. Windows NT had Service Pack 6 installed.

The test system was a Pentium III 600, 512MB SDRAM, 22GB IBM Ultra ATA 66 HDD, & a Linksys LNE10/100TX Ethernet Card