3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210
Dual Head Video Accelerator

Allen Harkleroad

June 1, 2000

3Dlabs GVX210 is an Editor's Choice Award Winner! "Perfection is only the beginning..."

I want perfection
Absolute perfection in accelerated graphics. That doesnt even begin to describe the speed and quality of the GVX210. First of all this card has two Glint R3 rasterizers and a 256-bit memory pipeline. Secondly, it has a GLINT Gamma G2 Geometry Processor for lighting acceleration in hardware. Next it can address up to 256 megabytes for texture memory, using host memory to store textures in memory. Lastly it has 64 megabytes of SGRAM (32 Megs per video head. The GVX210 is vigorous to say the least. While each head uses 32 Megs of RAM, a single head can make use of both Glint rasterizers so even in a single monitor configuration there is nothing in the high-end video card class that can even come close to the quality and speed of the GVX210.

The drivers for the GVX210 are stable and easy to install, as are all 3Dlabs drivers. We installed the card and booted into Windows 2000, it detected each of the video heads and proceeded to install the drivers. We rebooted and checked the hardware manager and both heads were showing up, as was the gamma processor. We fired up some of our favorite 3D applications (3D Studio Max 3.0, LightWave, SoftImage, Maya, Deep Paint 3D, and few others). There is absolutely no sluggishness in using the GVX210 in either dual or single monitor mode. Graphics in shaded/textured mode are eye-poppingly fast and as high quality as we have ever experienced. We were a bit stunned in seeing the difference between the GVX210 and GVX1 on our test machine. The Oxygen GVX1 card is fast and has super high quality output. There is no doubt that the GVX210 is indefectible (having no flaw or defect, perfect), it simply blew the GVX1 right out of the box.

We ran the GVX210 through it paces in both single and dual monitor mode; we particularly loved the seamless panning across multiple displays. The textures displayed were clear and well defined, no artifacts to be seen. You wont have to do a lot of re-working in scenes because this card truly displays the way a 3D card should. The GVX210 is truly one fine piece of hardware for the professional artist, designer, and animator. We ran the GVX210 hard and fast, it literally took everything we could think to throw at it. This card has it all and then some. 

We like it and recommend it, enough said.

Below are the feature set, performance and specifications. Everything a hardcore hardware user and informed consumer will want to read.

Features and performance as published by 3Dlabs

100% Complete OpenGL Geometry and Lighting Acceleration in Hardware
On-board hardware geometry acceleration boosts the interactivity of large models by up to three times and offloads the CPU for increased application performance. The 5Gflop, new generation GLINT Gamma G2 processes 100% of the OpenGL geometry pipeline in silicon, including 16 simultaneous light sources. 

Virtual Textures Allow You to Manipulate up to 256MB of Textures
An industry first that lets you manipulate up to 256MB of textures in a single scene. Oxygen GVX210 implements a full demand-paged virtual texture sub-system in hardware, using on-board graphics memory to cache huge textures stored in main system memory. 

PowerThreads SSE OpenGL Drivers with Dynamic Load Balancing
3Dlabs' new-generation PowerThreads OpenGL drivers are fully optimized for Intel Pentium III and AMD Athlon processors and dynamically balance the geometry and lighting load between the GLINT Gamma hardware geometry processor and the host CPU. PowerThreads combines the power of geometry hardware plus the additional power of today's processors for full performance scalability. 

Seamless Dual-head Support
The Oxygen GVX210 supports dual high-resolution displays under Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 from a single card, seamlessly supporting a total multi-monitor true-color desktop size of up to 4096x1536, with the flexibility to place a window anywhere on the desktop without interrupting OpenGL 3D acceleration.

Control Panel Application Configuration
3Dlabs' advanced control panel and task-bar applet let you point-and-click to effortlessly optimize your system configuration for your favorite professional applications. 

Technical Specifications
Dual GLINT R3 Rasterization Processors
Virtual Texture memory management unit
Full 256-bit memory bus architecture, drives 64MB of high-speed SGRAM
256MB Virtual Texture address space
Texture Unit with single pass, multi-texture capability
Integrated 300MHz RAMDAC
High-speed 128-bit memory interface per processor
7 independent DMA engines
2D/3D Raster Engine
Integrated SVGA Controller 
GLINT Gamma G2 Geometry Processor - 100% OpenGL Transform and Lighting in hardware
Full OpenGL 1.2 functionality in hardware
5 Gflop floating-point performance
16 Simultaneous light sources
6.3 Million lit, transformed triangles/sec n 
PowerThreads(tm) SSE OpenGL Drivers 
PowerThreads OpenGL ICD with full Intel Pentium III
SSE and AMD Athlon 3DNow! Optimizations
Dynamic Load Balancing distributes geometry and lighting load between GLINT Gamma G2 and host CPU
OpenGL 1.1 ICD (OpenGL 1.2 ready)
Multiprocessor system optimized 

Professional 3D Rendering 
Complete OpenGL 1.2 functionality in silicon
Virtual Texturing in silicon
Up to 256MB virtual texture space
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
GID clipping 

Hardware Performance 
Fill rate - 460Mtexels/sec dual bilinear MIP-map textures
Fill rate - 230Mpixels/sec trilinear mip-map texture
Polygon rate - 6.3M lit, transformed polygons/sec (50% backface culled)

SPECviewperf
- DX-05 score of 30.5 (1024x768 true-color 75Hz)
- DRV-06 score of 21.3 (1024x768 true-color 75Hz)
- Light-03 score of 3.5 (1280x1024 true-color 75Hz)
2D Winbench 99 HE 384 (1024x768 true color)
2D Winbench 99 BG 182 (1024x768 true color)
APC ProE Composite Score 5.48 

Board Physical Aspects 
Full-length ATX form-factor
AGP - AGP Version 2.0 Compliant
AGP Pro Compatible 

Memory 
64MB of high-speed SGRAM for framebuffer, Z-buffer and texture memory
Up to 256MB of host memory used as a Virtual Texture store 

Display
True color resolutions up to 2048x1536 double-buffered and 32-bit Z per monitor
4096x1536 total desktop size with dual monitors
60Hz-150Hz screen refresh rates (monitor dependant)
SoftImage-compliant 8-bit double-buffered overlay planes
DDC2B support on all operating systems 

Multi-head Capable 
Supports dual high-resolution displays from a single card under Windows NT4.0 or Windows 2000
Featuring a seamless desktop displayed across dual monitors with total resolutions up to 4096x1536 true-color 

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

Drivers
Windows NT 4.0 and PowerThreads OpenGL ICD
Windows 98, fully DirectX 7.0 compatible and PowerThreads OpenGL
Windows 2000 

Advanced Control Panel
Point-and-click to automatically optimize system configuration for each professional application

Value-added Software Bundles
Soft Engine 4, for up to 400% AutoCAD performance boost (a $300 value)
Colorific, for accurate color calibration and matching (a $50 value) 

Video
Bilinear filtered playback re-scaling
Hardware YUV-RGB conversion
Hardware MPEG-2 Motion Compensation Connectors
Dual DB-15 analog connector
3-pin Mini-din stereo connector 

System Requirements
100% IBM-compatible PC
Intel Pentium, AMD Processor or compatible
IBM Compatible motherboard with AGP or AGP Pro slot
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5 or higher
64MB system memory
16MB free disk space 

Warranty
Three (3) years parts and labor limited warranty 

Supported Screen Resolutions Display Resolution Color Depth Refresh Rates
640x480 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
800x600 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
1024x768 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
1152x864 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
1280x960 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
1280x1024 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
1600x1200 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 75,60Hz
1920x1080 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 100,85,75,60Hz
1920x1200 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 75,60Hz
2048x1536 8-bit, 16-bit, True-color 60Hz 


Fully Tested for All Leading Professional Graphics Applications
Including: 3D Studio Max, 3D Studio Viz, Houdini, Lightscape, LightWave 3D, Maya NT, Mirai, MultiGen Creator, SOFTIMAGE|3D, AutoCAD, CATIA, I-DEAS, MicroStation, Pro/ENGINEER, Solid Edge, SolidDesigner, SolidWorks, Unigraphics

Price: Under $2000.00

For more information or to get the latest pricing on the Oxygen GVX210 visit the 3Dlabs website.

Copyright (c) 2000, Allen Harkleroad, All Rights Reserved