Professional Affair: OpenGL Graphics Cards Compete

3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 - PowerThreads

But how does one take advantage of the supposedly great PowerThread capabilities that allow load balancing of the transform & lighting computations between the CPU and the geometry chip on the graphics card?

A 3DLabs employee revealed the secret: The number 16 must be entered in the field "Number of DMA Sub Buffers". Only then the PowerThread technology fully works, as you can see in the following impressive benchmark figure.

Well, the AWadvs-03 benchmarks show an enormous performance boost. But we could not detect performance increases of this kind in other benchmarks. We were wondering: If the PowerThreads fully unfold with these 16 sub buffers, why is 3DLabs not using them in the preset optimized settings for the applications? If you set the optimization for example to 3D Studio Max, we only read the number 5 in the field. Strange, isn't it?