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.