The slew of big x-factors in the spec list has been the cause of much speculation about the Permedia 3 chipset. With its "Virtual Texture" system, single pass bump mapping and single pass dual texture/triple blend operations, the Permedia 3 truly had some big unknowns, and speculation about its performance ran rampant.

With virtual texturing, the Oxygen VX1 is capable of locating and loading just the parts of a texture which are visible in each frame rather than loading the whole texture, which greatly reduces the need for texture swapping and thereby increases the effective bandwidth. This technology is even more exciting because of its transparency. A developer need not directly support this technology, as it underlies both OpenGL and Direct3D.

Virtual texturing aside, the Permedia 3 also offers bump-mapping as well as some rocking multi-pass texturing. With the Permedia 3's multipass texturing, 2 textures can be read, and 3 operations performed on them, all within a single clock cycle. This type of texturing would take a performance hit on most other cards on the market.

Bump-mapping on the other hand is a slightly more complicated subject.

The bump-mapping support on the Permedia3 was originally supposed to encompass the environment-map bump-mapping so strongly advertised by Matrox and their new G400 chip. Claiming emboss bump-mapping was nearly as good and for no performance hit, 3Dlabs opted against implementing environmental map bump-mapping. The Permedia 3 based cards do however support true single pass embossing, unlike many current 3D cards, and to the very trained eye, may make your embossed bumps look ever-so-slightly better. More interestingly however, the Permedia 3 supports dot product bump-mapping - a much more realistic way to do bump-mapping. Unfortunately this will take developer-level support before it makes any appearance in a 3D application.

Although the Oxygen claims mpeg motion compensation, the bundled software/drivers do not offer anything to play DVDs, which is a reflection again that the Oxygen VX1 is meant for the NT market. The Permedia 3 Create! on the other hand does come with fully functional DVD playing software. There is no mention of support for outputting to the TV with the Oxygen VX1, but 3Dlabs does say they have support coming for some massive multi-monitor setups (with multiple cards) later this year and early next year in the way of driver updates.