Cards With 3DLabs' Permedia 2 Chip

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/real-thing,45-5.html

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Cards With 3DLabs' Permedia 2 Chip

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/real-thing,45-5.html

I can find reviews on my own. I wanted to hear from people who actually owned one.

Well I don't run one now, but I do have a couple. I did however, ran one at my old workplace in a CAD machine during 98'-99'. I could actually play Carmageddon and Unreal (um, ah, during break of course? hehe) but wasn't nearly as good as my home machine with a Voodoo 2.

The Permedia 2 died one day and was replaced with a SiS 6326, and it was total garbage. When I got a Voodoo 3 I took my old Voodoo 2 to work so I could get my game on again.

I ran one in my 3D Accelerator thread, screenshots and benchmarks included. Pretty lame little chip if you ask me. It's just another chip that got steamrolled by competitors.

It is missing a number of important features. One interesting thing about it though is that id Software kinda liked it and used it as a sort of baseline for Quake 2 because it has quality OpenGL support. But it can't do the colored lighting and so Q2 looks quite different than normal.

And yeah it's quite slow. A Voodoo1 is surely faster and definitely works better with games.

Considering it came to market in 1997, it wasn't that bad of a single chip accelerator. While it wasn't quite up to par with the Riva 128, I would prefer it over other cards of the time like the Matrox Mystique 220, Virge GX, Cirrus Logic's Laguna, and maybe even the ATI Rage Pro.

A Virge can play S3D games (ie Terminal Velocity) and Rage Pro can play a unique version of Mechwarrior 2 so don't discount the others there too quickly. Permedia isn't really useful for more than 2D IMO... My FireGL 1000 is a pretty clean 2D card, I'll give it that.

Laguna 3D is pure garbage though. Even 2D is slow and 3D is basically useless. Mystique is pretty useless too. Its 2D is nothing special and 3D is barely better than software mode (and very buggy).

Although honestly all of the cards that weren't Voodoo were really buggy until NV brought out TNT. I wouldn't want anything other than a Voodoo2/3/5 for games from those days.

Let's also not forget that the Permedia series were never designed to be used for gaming in the first place, rather, they were cheap entry-level workstation graphics chips aimed at things like CAD and 3D rendering. I think it was mainly the price that caused 'em to spill over into the consumer market a bit, but their ability to play games was more coincidental than anything. And "professional" type cards have never been very good for gaming.

Yup Permedia has capable OpenGL support. It was the entry level pro graphics chip and that's why it was onboard Diamond's FireGL Pro 1000 workstation card.

I wouldn't be surprised if a NVIDIA TNT became a better choice for even professional apps though. TNT is several times faster than Permedia 2 and NV rapidly put together a superb OpenGL driver.

One of Permedia 2's other claims to fame is that it has integrated triangle setup hardware, previously a separate chip called Delta. So did Rendition and NV, but Voodoo 1 didn't have it and everybody called them out on it. But Voodoo2 did have it. 😉 Triangle setup wasn't a big deal back then though, outside of pro apps with much more complex geometry.

sliderider wrote:

I can find reviews on my own. I wanted to hear from people who actually owned one.

Cranky pants 🤣

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Cards With 3DLabs' Permedia 2 Chip

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/real-thing,45-5.html

"(...)The 2.5 to 5 times faster Voodoo 2 is already on the horizon whilst Voodoo still rules. 3Dfx is one of the few other computer hardware companies next to Intel, that doesn't have to worry about its future." 🙄

sliderider wrote:

Does anyone have any experience with cards based on this chipset? How did it compare to others of it's time?

I noted the following in the "Modern Graphics on a 486" thread,

3DLabs Permedia2 4MB
Display drivers installed fine for Win98SE and NT4. The blackness of the screen was a little less black instead of expected jet black. Not exactly grey, but the lack of true black might bother some. Quake2 in OpenGL mode ran, however it was initially very slow at loading, as if the machine froze-up for about a minute. I recorded 4.7 fps in Quake2 Default OpenGL at 640x480 using a Cyrix 5x86-120 (2x60). For comparison, the Matrox G200 in NT4 scored 6.8 fps with the same CPU/motherboard/RAM. Display driver at 1280x1024x16 tested ok.

The lack of jet black really bothered me.

I used a Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro (PCI, if I remember correctly) for a few years during the late 90's in a Pentium PC running WinNT 4. The card itself was fine but I think Diamond's drivers were flaky, however I believe you could get alternate drivers from 3DLabs that were pretty solid. I did quite a bit of 3D Studio MAX work with it.

Overall it was a decent all-rounder card, though certainly not exceptional in any particular area. 8MB also limited it to full color at 1280x1024, which was adequate for the time. It's cheap enough now that you could just buy one on eBay and see if you like it. There are PCI and AGP versions, and each can be had for about $10.

Bitsavers has added 3DLabs Permedia 1 (Texas Instruments TVP4010) and Permedia 2 (Texas Instruments TVP4020) docs, and a Win95 Permedia 1 driver set.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ti/TVP4010/
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ti/TVP4020/

I've forwarded the docs on to vlask, who already has some others (submitted by me) at http://www.vgamuseum.info ; vlask will probably make them available later. 😀

Uploaded the Win95 drivers for 3DLabs Permedia 1 to vogonsdrivers.com - http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=575

I used to have a system with a Pentium Overdrive 200 MHz and a Creative Graphics Blaster Exxtreme (Permedia 2). It ran MotoRacer like a charm but was basically useless for everything else that required 3D acceleration. Although, I was doing some 3D modeling at the time, and the Permedia 2 was surprisingly competent there. 2D image quality was quite good as well.

i have no love for the permedia2 although i have one(firegl1000pro). not only the speed was slow(on par with rendition2200, and around 40-50% of the g200 and riva128), but the 3d image quality also being the most disqualifying one of all first-generation 3d cards that i tested.

I've tested my Appian Jeronimo Pro some days ago.

This card is based on two Permedia 2 chips, but the chips don't summarize their power, they just drive two monitors. My system specs are: ASUS CUSL2, PIII 800MHz, 256MB SDRAM, Quantum Fireball lct20 20GB, Win98SE. Here are test results:

- FinalReality - 3.24
- 3DMark'99 - 140 (very low fps)
- Carmageddon II - min fps result was 12 (I don't remember resolution, but probably 800x600)
- Hal-Life I - min framerate 15fps (OpenGL rendering, 640x480)

So this chip is not very good for playing old games.

I had similar results with my Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro on my PIII system.

Recently decided to have another go with this card, Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro , 3D Labs permedia 2 8MB AGP. This time with a Celeron Mendocino 466 MHz(skt 370) on ASUS CUSL2 motherboard(intel 815) windows ME and 265K SDRAM.
It did pretty well, especially for a 1997 3D card, also what I had not noticed before was the great image quality, it's crisp, bright and sharp with a great colour balance. I'd say comparable to my Matrox Mystique 220.

Anyhow, here are some scores.

Final Reality.

2D Image 4.20.
3D performance 3.28.
Bus Transfer 1.01.
AGP Test 39.58. Images/s

3D MARK 99 MAX

1222 3D Marks.
4280 CPU 3D marks.

MS-DOS scores.

3Dbench2 655.7
PCP Bench 135
Doom FPS 109.84 Realticks 680.
Quake 94.4.

I just added this card to my Dos benchmarking project..
Old+Modern videocards pure DOS benchmarking- which one is fastest?, need your numbers + analysis, 320x200 to 1600x1200!

Q2DOS has bad color pallete problem, as some other cards, i already reported that, but i doubt that they will ever fix..