Great Budget Workstation Card
Written: Jun 02 '00 (Updated Nov 28 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great performance/price
Cons: sub-par gaming performance
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| Carbon111's Full Review: 3DLabs Permedia 2 Oxygen VX1 |
You won't win any games of Quake with this card but the 3dLabs VX1 performs on par with workstation graphics cards costing thousands of dollars.
I'm a 3D graphics artist and was looking for a card that fit within my budget...about $200. An optimized-for-games card like the GeForce or Voodoo was out of the question as they don't really do anything for the kind of high-end applications I was running like Lightwave and 3D Studio Max.
I was considering an E&S Lightning 1200 but at over $600 it was a bit steep. Later on, by checking independant real-world benchmarks at a number of websites, I discovered that the VX1 was a much faster card and provided some features the other card couldn't touch.
Once I started using the card I was amazed at the difference in performance from my old TNT. This card has the FULL implementation of OpenGL in HARDWARE and a special driver allows the VX1 to use my system ram as a huge texture cache!
I am able to work on and manipulate large scenes and models even in fully shaded mode with an ease and fluidity that I thought would be beyond my budget for quite a while. Renders are very fast and extremely accurate.
Be sure to get the 32mb version...they just released a 16mb "budget" version that just dosent compare in terms of power.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 175
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Epinions.com ID:
Carbon111
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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