3DLABS PERMEDIA2 vs PERMEDIA3

COMMENT - "When it comes to 3D rendering the difference is very clear, here is a chart showing the performance of the two video cards in 3D Studio Max (OPENGL) at 1024x768x32bit, a faster lower score is obviously better. As you can clearly see the difference in performance was 40seconds, it might not sound like much but when some scenes take days to complete that 40second different will become huge. The Permedia 2 is ok for light rendering but for serious work the Permedia 3 will give much better performance."

COMMENT - "The Permedia 3 takes a commanding lead of 36mps over the Permedia 2 at 16bit and 42mps at 32bit, both cards gave good 2D quality. The result was pretty much as expected, the Permedia 3 is the more modern video card."

BENCHMARK SETTINGS

Direct3D HAL
Gourad Shading Model
Solid Model
Textures Enabled
Fog Enabled
Dithering Enabled
Antialiasing Enabled
Bilinear Texturing Enabled
Transparent Textures Enabled
Perspective Enabled

COMMENT - "The Permedia 2 does alot better than expected at the Direct3D test, both video cards gave average performance. The Permedia 2 was never more than 13fps slower than the Permedia 3, an impressive showing by the Permedia 2."

BENCHMARK SETTINGS

3dnow OpenGL Driver
Demo1.dm2 benchmark
Fullscreen enabled
Texture Quality Full
8Bit Textures Disabled
Sync Every Frame Disabled

COMMENT - "I expected good frame rates from the Permedia 2 after the good result with the Direct3D test. However it didn't go so well, with Quake2 the Permedia 2 was very poor indeed. The Permedia 3 had a huge 41fps advantage over the Permdia 2, the Permdia 2 could only manage 19fps at 640x480x16bit."

	27
	51

	8
	34

	N/A
	20

COMMENT - "After the very poor showing by the Permedia 2 in Quake 2 I wasn't holding any hope for the Permedia 2 with Quake 3 Arena. If it gave such poor performance with an old game like Quake 2 then it couldn't perform better with Quake 3 could it? I was shocked to see that the score for Quake 3 at it's fastest setting was an impressive (for the Permedia 2 atleast) 27fps, it's almost playable. If your using either the Permedia 2 or 3 for games then you deserve to be shot!"

BENCHMARK SETTINGS

Default GLdriver
GL Extensions on
Fullscreen on
Demo001 Benchmark

FASTEST QUALITY

512x384 Video Mode
16Bit Colour Depth
16Bit Texture Quality
Vertex Lighting
Geometic Detail Low
Texture Detail 50%
Bilinear Texture Filtering

NORMAL QUALITY

640x480 Video Mode
16Bit Colour Depth
16Bit Texture Quality
Lightmap Lighting
Geometic Detail Medium
Texture Detail 75%
Bilinear Texture Filtering

HIGH QUALITY

800x600 Video Mode
32Bit Colour Depth
32Bit Texture Quality
Lightmap Lighting
High Geometic Detail
Full Texture Detail
Trilinear Texture Filtering

CONCLUSION - "The Permedia 3 is vastly superior to the Permedia 2 when it comes to games, neither cards were designed for games but the Permedia 3 gave playable frame rates, it's 2D quality was also very good."