LOSTCIRCUITS

Still, why is it that very often graphics designers are found using MacIntosh computers instead of PCs or else graphics cards that even the average gamer has hardly heard of? Names like Quantum3D or 3DLabs are not exactly household brands in the who is who, nonetheless, they not only exist but have a fair market share. If not office and neither gaming, who would be the clientele? As mentioned already, computer designers, game developers and the entire legion of CAD professionals have to rely on true representation of the 3 dimensional space. In this domain, a very important factor is also that the colors are true, rather than vibrant. Furthermore, to reintroduce the headache factor, one couldn’t possibly blame those who make a living off sitting the entire day in front of the screen, if they prefer high-end output warranted by a fast RAMDAC. If then somebody else takes their product and breaks every possible speed record in benchmarks, well, I guess they are glad that it runs so well.

For some time, the brave new high end graphics world lived as self sustained elite society quite well. However, the quasi overnight breakthrough of the home PC spurned by Microsoft conquering the world has dramatically changed the demand of the market. After the success of the original Permedia as the first consumer oriented graphics adapter from 3DLabs in 1996, the company seemingly overlooked the potential of this explosive growth in the low end market. Not to mention the battle in the CPU sector that accelerated the clock speed to frequencies almost 5 years ahead of (Intel’s original) schedule, thus pushing also the demands on video cards into hitherto unexplored regions.

One needs to bear in mind here that developing a functional CPU is an almost trivial enterprise compared to the demand of designing graphics adapters. Not only has the diversity of the platforms to be taken into account but also the numerous specific demands in terms of APIs and ICDs and the little glitches here and there in the xillions of graphics applications. Simple solutions are much easier to upgrade and to adapt to the new demands than sophisticated entities and, therefore, the high end manufacturers were hit much worse than some of the smaller, more flexible players. Enter the introduction of stand alone 2D / 3D cards and all of a sudden, even the successor of the original Permedia (fancifully named Permedia2) looked like a wet sock compared to the Banshee and G200 or TNT, despite the fact that the chip itself found its way into a variety of OEM cards and was a financial success.

The "Red Queen Paradigm" states that you need to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. In a company like 3DLabs that can only translate into uncoupling the consumer market from the high end workstation, in order to (Permedia3)Create the necessary flexibility for their lower end cards. There are certain caveats to watch out for, though. For once, you never give up a strong position in favor of running with the in-pack. That means that a quality-oriented company simply cannot afford to have a mediocre product in its repertoire because the reputation would fall back on the entire company. In the case of 3DLabs, this means that, if the guidelines of the company were to be preserved, then there could be no possible compromise in terms of image quality, whereas a sacrifice in speed could be well excusable.

Let’s take a look at the Create!, 3DLabs latest graphics adapter based on the Permedia3 chip.

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