I think I have that card. I have not tested it, but I think it is a standard 8mb permedia 2 card. You can find permedia 2 reviews online easily. Workstation card, but you could consider It a voodoo 1 competitor mostly and came out betweeen voodoo 1 and voodoo 2.
http://vgamuseum.info/index.php/news/item/17- … labs-permedia-2

Permedia 2 is NOT a workstation card, I think. I had it back in the late 90s as a standard desktop/gaming card. Decent, but not stellar performance.

In many reviews they were called workstation cards. They say things like: "3Dlabs reoriented new Permedia to a "workstation" product with gaming abilities and remained silent about consumer market ambitions ever since."

root42 wrote:

Permedia 2 is NOT a workstation card, I think. I had it back in the late 90s as a standard desktop/gaming card. Decent, but not stellar performance.

They were most definitely entry level "Prosumer" workstation cards but they had passable 3D performance so some (i.e. Creative) were marketed more or less for gaming.

The Permedia 2 has a complete OpenGL ICD and was one of the very, very few chips capable of running Quake3 Test without so much as a hiccup when it first appeared. The only other chip I knew of that could do that on Day 1 was the i740, and I had both of them back then: An 8MB STB Glyder Max II (Permedia 2) and a 4MB Real 3D Starfighter.

In Quake 2 the particle effects as rendered by the Permedia 2 are pretty hard to beat. I remember an article about it basically gushing over how well the railgun's particle trail was so perfectly done on it over many of the other cards in the test but it's lack of some form of transparency was an issue. 16bit color in Q3T was horrendous thanks to atrocious dithering but at 24bit it looked really good but was a lot slower.

Baoran wrote:

In many reviews they were called workstation cards. They say things like: "3Dlabs reoriented new Permedia to a "workstation" product with gaming abilities and remained silent about consumer market ambitions ever since."

Context please. I wrote that about Permedia 3.

Permedia 2 came in many Dell machines in 1997, including Dimension XPS. They were later replaced with Riva128 and Millennium II as the line was divided into home and workstation versions. It has some rudimentary 3D capabilities and game support but it's neither an interesting nor a desirable card IMO.

Putas wrote:

Baoran wrote:

In many reviews they were called workstation cards. They say things like: "3Dlabs reoriented new Permedia to a "workstation" product with gaming abilities and remained silent about consumer market ambitions ever since."

Context please. I wrote that about Permedia 3.

Sorry about that. I was doing searches about permedia 2 and I must have missed the permedia 3 part.

In any case I have 2 permdia 2 agp cards that just looked like standard office video cards to me and I had put them in my "junk office cards" box. One is gloria synergy+ compaq and the other one is a card made by stb systems that has permedia 2 chip on it.
I always thought they would be too slow for any agp system. Do they even use any agp features or is the agp interface just for show like with voodoo 3 cards?

Edit: I also never thought compaq branded card would be a gaming card. That is one reason why I assumed them being office cards or similar.

Baoran wrote:

Do they even use any agp features or is the agp interface just for show like with voodoo 3 cards?

They do. And even AGP "just for show" at the very least doubles the bandwidth over PCI.

Putas wrote:

Baoran wrote:

Do they even use any agp features or is the agp interface just for show like with voodoo 3 cards?

They do. And even AGP "just for show" at the very least doubles the bandwidth over PCI.

I guess that would make them bad even for slow super socket 7 platforms since you would be facing the agp bugs?

Baoran wrote:

Putas wrote:

Baoran wrote:

Do they even use any agp features or is the agp interface just for show like with voodoo 3 cards?

They do. And even AGP "just for show" at the very least doubles the bandwidth over PCI.

I guess that would make them bad even for slow super socket 7 platforms since you would be facing the agp bugs?

Disable them then.

Baoran wrote:

I guess that would make them bad even for slow super socket 7 platforms since you would be facing the agp bugs?

I'm not sure about the VIA SS7 chipsets, but the ALi Aladdin V based board I had worked just fine with my AGP Permedia2 card.

Just curious. Is this permedia 2 video made by someone on vogons?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0Bo_DZ5iw

IIRC some early IBM Intellistations came with Permedias.

As the name suggests its an entry level professional card based on the permedia 2. Gloria was the Name of the Elsa professional graphic products. The extra memory can be used to extend the 4MB onboard memory to 8 MB. Versions existed with or without the memory slot soldered to the board as well as with and without optional video in and output. (btw, the Vi/Vo board in the Compaq manual looks much like the Winner 2000 on vgamuseum.info) As mentioned before the board was sold by several OEMs. I own some with Compaq part no as well as some spare memory boards. The Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro and Creative Graphic Blaster Exxtreme features the same chip and it was even used for some Alpha CPU based workstation by DEC. The Appian Jeronimo Pro features two Permedia 2 Chips on a single board. Interesting fact is Elsa released the Winner 2000 Office with the same chip in their Winner named office series.
eisapc

Baoran wrote on 2019-01-10, 21:14:

Just curious. Is this permedia 2 video made by someone on vogons?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0Bo_DZ5iw

Yes