3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 PCI

DesignReview (DRV-06) Viewset

Taken from http://www.spec.org/gpc/opc.static/drv.htm

DesignReview is a 3D computer model review package specifically tailored for plant design models consisting of piping, equipment and structural elements such as I-beams, HVAC ducting, and electrical raceways. It allows flexible viewing and manipulation of the model for helping the design team visually track progress, identify interferences, locate components, and facilitate project approvals by presenting clear presentations that technical and non-technical audiences can understand. There are 6 tests specified by the viewset that represent the most common operations performed by DesignReview. These tests are as follows:

Test	Weight	DRV functionality represented
1	45%	Walkthrough rendering of curved surfaces. Each curved object (i.e., pipe, elbow) is rendered as a triangle mesh, depth-buffered, smooth-shaded, with one light and a different color per primitive.
2	30%	Walkthrough rendering of flat surfaces. This is treated as a different test than #1 because normals are sent per facet and a flat shade model is used.
3	8%	For more realism, objects in the model can be textured. This test textures the curved model with linear blending and mipmaps.
4	5%	Texturing applied to the flat model.
5	4%	As an additional way to help visual identification and location of objects, the model may have "screen door" transparency applied. This requires the addition of polygon stippling to test #2 above.
6	4%	To easily spot rendered objects within a complex model, the objects to be identified are rendered as solid and the rest of the view is rendered as a wireframe (line strips). The line strips are depth-buffered, flat-shaded and unlit. Colors are sent per primitive.
7	4%	Two other views are present on the screen to help the user select a model orientation. These views display the position and orientation of the viewer. A wireframe, orthographic projection of the model is used. Depth buffering is not used, so multithreading cannot be used; this preserves draw order.

The Oxygen GVX1 is performing quite nicely here and the lead the GeForce holds is much less than the massacre we saw in the last test. While the more expensive GVX1 does come in second place in all of the tests, it is close on the heels of the GeForce overall and keeping in mind that the GVX1 was out months before the GeForce was even talked about, the performance isn't terrible.

But why not go out and buy a GeForce today for all of your professional rendering applications? There is more to this equation than just performance, but we'll get to that in a bit, let's finish up these numbers first.