3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 PCI

Virtual Texturing Management

The release of the Savage3D added a new buzzword to the vocabulary of the online gaming industry, that phrase was "texture compression." The basic idea behind S3's texture compression algorithm was to allow the user to enjoy the benefits of enormous amounts of textures, without having to deal with a huge drop in performance.

3Dlabs attempted to employ a technique known as Virtual Texturing Management, with a similar goal in mind. The idea behind the GLINT R3's Virtual Texture Management is quite simple, instead of having frame rates that feature extreme highs and extreme lows (i.e. ranging between 5 and 55 fps) Virtual Texture Management makes sure that your frame rates remain at a more constant level (i.e. 30 fps).

Acting as sort of an L2 cache, the GVX1's 32MB on-board memory works in cooperation with up to 256MB of your local memory which is used to store textures. When a request for those textures is made, the Virtual Texture Engine takes the textures it needs to display and transfers them from the local system memory to the graphics frame buffer. For gamers, S3's Texture Compression is a much more viable option than 3Dlabs' Virtual Texture Engine, however if you keep in mind that the GVX1 isn't a hard core gamer's card, the Virtual Texture Management support of the GVX1 begins to make much more sense.

When rendering any complex scene, especially when dealing with a large amount of textures in the scene, it makes more sense to be able to manipulate the scene at a reasonable speed rather than have extreme highs and lows in the frame rate. With any sort of texture compression, there is the possibility for a loss of visual quality, a sacrifice which simply cannot be made when dealing with professional applications. In a game, whether a wall's texture appears a certain way isn't of the utmost importance, however when designing an object or a scene in a professional application, the importance of maintaining visual quality does rise. Would you want the designer of your house looking at a rendering of the house with incorrectly displayed textures?

This theme of visual quality over performance is one that is made very clearly among graphics professionals and you will see it appear over and over again as we take a look at the performance of the GVX1 and its competitors.

The Virtual Texture Management engine is, by default, taken advantage of by all OpenGL 1.2 compliant applications. Direct3D applications may take advantage of the specification as well, however only if proper support is provided for in the coding of the application or game itself. With most professionals claiming loyalty to the OpenGL API, the Virtual Texture Management of the GVX1 will probably become a key part of your system's performance without you even realizing it.