Sharky Extreme heeft een preview gepost van de langverwachte Permedia 3 videochip van 3DLabs. Hamvraag is of de Permedia 3, met z'n 250Mtex/s fillrate, bij z'n release kan concurreren met de TNT2 en Voodoo3. Afgezien van dat heeft-ie wel een paar leuke features, waaronder "Virtual Textures":
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.
Zie Joan's review @ SE voor meer info.
