Price: $279 - $290

Bundle: Vibrant's Soft Engine 4, Colorific

Available: July 15th

Almost a full year since the announcement of the Permedia 3 graphics processor, 3Dlabs has finally begun production on what was once meant to be a foray into the 3D gaming market. For years now, 3Dlabs has brought quality, high-end video cards to the graphics workstation market, and since 1996 has fringed the outside of the 3D gaming market with the Permedia series of graphics chips. The Permedia 2 was never a serious contender in the market, but with their OpenGL prowess 3Dlabs certainly caused a stir in the community with the Permedia 3.

Over the past year, gamers have had a good long time to muse about the Permedia 3 and what constitutes minimum gaming performance has evolved quite a bit. Touted originally as a gaming/performance chip, 3Dlabs has now put a "workstation" spin on their latest graphics processor and separated their card lineup based on two market segments: Business/Web Professionals and Graphics Workstation Professionals.

The Permedia3 Create! board from 3Dlabs is marketed as a card for "Graphics Productivity for Business and Web Professionals" who "need to work fast all day and play hard all night" while the slightly more expensive Glint R3-based Oxygen VX1 , is targeted towards the "Industrial Strength Graphics for Workstation Professionals" or low-end graphics workstation market. Both cards are due to begin shipping on July 15 but neither card appears to be the game board we've all been waiting for.

Confused? We were until 3Dlabs' Jean Salvati straightened us out:

"The Oxygen VX1 uses the GLINT R3 chip, which is basically the workstation version of Permedia 3. The two chips are almost identical. They have exactly the same functionality and performance in games (multi-texturing, bump mapping, etc). The 2D is also the same. The only differences are in Softimage, and with multi-cpu machines."

This will turn out to be a disappointment for most gamers, but it does usher in a new convergence - high-end workstation graphics accelerators meeting 3D gaming accelerators. Again to be perfectly clear, since the 3Dlabs Create! card is not available, we've decided to take the workstation positioned Oxygen VX1 card and put it through our standard entertainment game benchmarks. This is due to its gaming performance being "almost identical" to the upcoming Create! card according to 3Dlabs themselves.