3Dlabs aims to help with this process by including instructions and example code for advanced feature implementation along with recommended methods for "work arounds" and compatibility with other popular hardware. So a developer gets a roadmap for implementing the feature plus a cheat sheet for compatibility with each of the other manufacturer's boards. This type of support will encourage developers to implement advanced features instead of building for the "lowest common denominator" hardware, resulting in you actually getting to see what those advanced features that you paid for look like, a nice bonus for everybody.
On the technology side, Permedia 3's Triple-Blend Texture Core, a one up on single pass multi-texturing and a fancy way of saying that 3Dlab's new part can perform two texture reads and three texture blend operations per clock cycle, calls for 250 megatexels per second, 32-bit color, 2084x2084x32-bit texture support, perspective correct per-pixel tri-linear mip-mapping, full DirectX 6 feature set, multiple effects per clock cycle, 32-bit linear Z-buffer, 24-bit and 16-bit non-linear Z-buffer (a sweet trick for allocating more precision in determining the Z depth of closer objects), full blend modes and alpha tests, full-scene line and edge anti-aliasing, emboss (the software cheat) and DOT3 (the real thing) bump mapping and 3D textures. And that's just for starters.
Things get even more interesting with the Virtual Textures feature of the hardware, which enables high-quality high-resolution textures and manages them in a very efficient way. It allows for more textures per scene and smoother rendering by allocating up to 256MB of virtual texture. In a nutshell, textures are snipped up into small bits and demand-page loaded with logical-physical address mapping. So if you only need to render the sleeve of Our Hero's shirt for a particular frame, you don't have to load up his whole skin map. This feature enhances bandwidth of the AGP bus and optimizes on-board memory utilization. Best of all, it is automatic and therefore completely transparent to developers under DirectX or OpenGL.
