By: Allen Harkleroad

 

May 1, 2001

Just like the old saying, Better just keeps getting better so does 3Dlabs video card products. We have been beyond pleased with the stableness and speed of the GVX1 Pro video card. Since the day it was installed (3 months ago) there has been no problems with either the card or drivers (same drivers since install no updating). It is a pleasure to use the card in day-to-day graphics and 3D work. For its price you cant go wrong with its performance.

Here are some specifications on the GVX 1 Pro:

New OpenGL graphics Processors (GLINT)
(GLINT 4 rasteriser, GLINT Gamma 2 geometry Processor)

64 Megabytes of graphics memory

256 Megabytes of virtual texture storage
(physical card memory and hard drive memory swap)

VGA and DVI-I Flat Panel Connectors

Stereo view connector

AGP (x2)

PowerThreads OpenGL ICD

Runs great on Windows NT and Windows 2000
(we tested it on Windows 2000 and the new Windows XP (beta)

The GLINT 4 processor is a 128 bit architecture chip and runs at 300mhz, it also has 7 DMA engines to lessen CPU load while being utilized. Windowed applications run smoothly with no jerkiness or hesitation. The GLINT Gamma 2 geometry processor is 100% OpenGL 1.2 compliant and performs transformation and lighting right on the chip (versus software OpenGL that runs on the host machine). The Gamma 2 has a 5 gigaflop floating point performance and provides 6.3 million transformed lit triangles per second. The chip also can handle 16 light sources at one time (directional, positional, and spot lights). Two sided lighting is supported on the chip.

We have had a great time testing this card and even under heavy strain the card performed flawlessly. To ensure future compatibility we ran the card on Windows XP (the future version of what we now call Windows 2000), and we amazed with the card. Windows XP allowed the installation of the drivers and of course we were happy with not having to trick the operating system into using the drivers. With three months of using the card we havent had a need to find new drivers or force drivers to work. Everyone using the test machine have been productive and not had any headaches from the GVX 1 Pro or drivers. My opinion is if you are a heavy duty 3D animator, modeler or perform a lot of heavy video tasks (even 2D such as Adobe Photoshop) you will love this card, I know we do!

We tested the card on the following applications; discreet 3D Studio Max 3, discreet 3D studio max 4, Newtek Lightwave 6, Discreet Combustion, Corel Bryce 4, Houdini 3D, SoftImage 1.5, Caligari trueSpace 5, Right Hemispheres Deep Paint 3D and 3D Exploration, and several other 3D products. On the 2D side we tested the GVX1 Pro with: Adobe Photoshop 6.0, CorelDraw 10, Corel PhotoPaint 10, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat 4.0, Adobe InDesign 1.5, Microsoft Office 2000 and FrontPage, Corel Painter 6, Adobe Premiere 5, Adobe GoLive 5.

There were no issues with any of the products we tested the GX1 Pro on, even Quake 2 runs like a champ!

3Dlabs has become a serious mid to high video card manufacturer and with each new product they seem to break the barrier in performance, reliability and price.

Price

Less than $1000.00 direct from 3Dlabs

Power Threads Driver Specifications

Full OpenGL 1.1 ICD (1.2 ready)

Dynamic load balancing optimizes geometry and lighting load between GLINT
Gamma G2 and host CPU

Fully optimized for Intel SSE and AMD 3DNow!

Professional 3D Rendering

Complete OpenGL 1.2 functionality in silicon

Full OpenGL overlays

Single pass bump-mapping, per-pixel lighting

High-quality Gouraud shading

Perspective correct bilinear and trilinear filtering with per-pixel mip-mapping

Dual bilinear mip-mapped textures in a single pass

2048x2048x32 maximum individual texture size

Source and destination alpha blending

Fogging and depth cueing

Antialiased lines and polygons

Full-scene antialiasing

Hardware scissoring, stippling and stencil buffers

GID clipping for efficient window management

32 bit Z-buffering

Integrated Video Processing

Hardware YUV-RGB conversion

Hardware MPEG-2 Motion Compensation

Virtual Texturing Memory Management

Full virtual memory management unit in GLINT R4 silicon allows the board to act as a full 256 MB graphics card

Board Physical Specifications

Short-card ATX form-factor

AGP 1x/2x/4x compatible

AGP Pro compatible

64 MB of unified high-speed SDRAM for framebuffer, Z-buffer and texture memory

Connectors

DB-15 analog connector

3-pin mini-din stereo connector

MDR20 DFP digital flat panel connector

On board DVI-I connector

High-resolution DFP and Digital CRT Output

Drives digital displays up to 1600x1200 @60 Hz and analog displays up to 2048x1536 @60 Hz

Stereo Support

True, quad-buffered stereo support up to 1280x1024, true-color, 118 Hz refresh rate

Drivers

Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 with PowerThreads OpenGL ICD

Microsoft Windows 2000 with PowerThreads OpenGL ICD and DirectX 7.0

DDC2B support on all operating systems

Advanced Control Panel

Point and click to automatically optimize system and configuration for key professional application

System Requirements

100% IBM compatible PC

Intel Pentium II or AMD Athlon K6 processor or compatible

IBM compatible motherboard with AGP or AGP Pro slot

Microsoft Windows 2000 or NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5 or higher

64 MB system memory

16 MB free disk space

Warranty

Three (3) years parts and labor limited warranty


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Copyright 2001, Allen Harkleroad, All Rights Reserved