Professional Affair: OpenGL Graphics Cards Compete

3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210

Compared to its little brother the Oxygen GVX210 offers twice as much in many ways. For example this card has two R3 rasterizer chips with twice the fill rates, two VGA outputs and with 64 MByte SGRAM twice as much memory as the GVX1. To say this right at the beginning: we really hesitated to include this card in our comparison test, because it does not meet our specification of a maximum price of 1000 Dollars. 3DLabs sets the price at a hefty 2000 Dollars. The manufacturer shipped the card unsolicited to us. Finally we tested the card nevertheless, since we were interested in the functionality of the second monitor connection, and we wanted to know whether the performance of this card justifies doubling the price.

In the upper section of the picture, you see both the GLINT R3 rasterization processors. As expected, 3DLabs doubles the maximum fill rate from 230 to 460 MTexels/s (dual bilinear mip-map textures) compared to the GVX1. But this does not necessarily mean that it also doubles the performance, as you see later in the benchmark results. The GVX210 utilizes a more powerful geometry processor: the GLINT Gamma 2. It allows a maximum polygon rate of 6.3 MPolys/s (with lighting and transformation). The Gamma G1 on the GVX1 only achieves 4.75 MPolys/s.

Both the blue VGA connectors are clearly visible. Unlike on the GVX1, Oxygen has no space left for the DFP connector. The left side of the picture shows the connector for stereo goggles again, that we already described for the GVX1.