3Dlabs Permedia 3 Create!

High-End Performance – Windows NT

The tests under Windows NT are the real deal, we've already experimented with the various cards under Direct3D and under Windows 98 in general, however under NT things can change considerably. The Voodoo3 and the G400 were immediately tossed out of the NT tests for a very obvious reason, neither card features a publically available OpenGL ICD in a final or near final form.

The Permedia 3 comes away once again, with a smooth first place holding. However the first place holding is just 11 seconds (or about 5%) faster than the runner up, the NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra. While the next logical argument would be that a TNT2 Ultra is already running at around $220, the fact that the Permedia 3 Create! is expected to sell in the $219 - $239 range won't make anyone feel guilty about giving up 5% for work, and gaining about 100% in gaming performance.

You know what they say, all work and no play makes 3Dlabs a happy camper. For a card attempting to target the professional by day, gamer by night market, the Permedia 3 isn't wiping the floor at either end, instead cards like the TNT2 and the Rage 128 are holding it face down, and saving a few bucks at that too.

The G200 was omitted from this graph as its score was well above 2000 seconds, a definite indication of poor NT driver support.

The best way to determine if drivers are the fault of poor performance is to use 3D Studio Max's supplied Heidi Software Z buffer for the rendering. This takes some of the load off of the graphics card and its drivers and places it on the CPU, which is the reason for the relatively small differences between the cards.

The reason for this comparison isn't to prove one card better than another, rather to attemp to point out driver weaknesses in the individual cards.

The G200 boasts a huge performance increase when using the Heidi Software Z buffer which is a perfect indication of poor drivers on the part of Matrox. With a bit of performance tweaking, it wouldn't be surprising if the G200 could become a definite contender in the high-end market (in this particular price range) however the likelyhood of something like that happening isn't too great judging by Matrox's past. Maybe the G400 will change things once NT drivers are finally released...

The rest of the cards remain fairly stationary in terms of the standings, however the Savage4 exhibits very Matrox like behavior in this benchmark as it dropped from a render time of 366 seconds down to 269, a drop of 97 seconds.