Somewhere in the past year, while 3Dlabs has seemingly been in stasis, it would seem someone has stolen the Permedia 3's (Austin Power's voice) "mojo". What once had gamers talking in hushed tones about multiple texture operations and virtual textures has now been reduced below the level most gamers will even think twice about. The card is a shadow of what most hard core gamers (Sharky's staff included) expected it to be in the gaming arena. While the card may have some large merits to the graphic design amateur or professional, it surely won't quench your 3D gaming needs, which the benchmarks we recorded illustrate quite clearly.

3D visual quality is something that's often overlooked when shopping for a new video card - as long as it supports 32bit color it should be good enough right? Well, maybe not. The Oxygen VX1 showed some deviance from the 3D quality we have come to expect from current video cards. While the graphics themselves were on par with any TNT2 card, there were a few places where polygons disappeared or were colored incorrectly versus what we knew to expect. Our contact at 3Dlabs has submitted a bug report based on our findings and reports they are working on the problems, which appear to be driver related. In the Oxygen's defense, it looked absolutely wonderful in Quake3 Arena, easily up to the standard set by the TNT2 or a G400 MAX for that matter.

Packing a 300MHz RAMDAC, the Oxygen VX1 supports refresh rates of up to 76Hz at a 2D desktop resolution of 1900x1200 and even manages a lofty 2048x1536 at 60Hz if your monitor can sustain it. It must be said however, that working with the Oxygen VX1 in 1600x1200 was a little difficult, as the text display was not as crisp of that on several TNT2s we've used, and the speeds were slacking a little as well.

Being spoiled by 2D speed and quality found on most recent cards, it was somewhat of a surprise to us to find a brand new chipset that just doesn't keep up with the established veterans of the market. In all fairness, this will make little difference to most people, but for those of us who like the bigger desktop space provided by a 1600x1200 resolution, the Permedia 3 is an underachiever.