3Dlabs didn't seem to follow normal conventions in implementing AGP capabilities in the Permedia3. Officially, the Permedia3 fully supports the AGP2X transfer mode with sidebanding. However, in Win98, both PCIList and PowerStrip (both from Entech Taiwan) reported that the Permedia3 supported only AGP1X transfer mode and also stated that the Permedia3 wasn't using AGP at all!

Win98 PCIList 2.10 Diagnostic Report

Win98 PowerStrip 2.69 Diagnostic Report

In Windows 2000, PowerStrip reported pretty much the same except that the Permedia3 was actually using sideband addressing even though the card has been reported not to support AGP2X. In addition, PowerStrip couldn't even confirm that the card was even using AGP transfers at all.

Win2k PowerStrip 2.69 Diagnostic Report

3Dlabs' Jean Salvati informed me that while the Permedia3 supports AGP 2X, they encountered some compatibility problems with certain chipsets and/or motherboards. Hence, 3Dlabs decided to set the Permedia3 Create! to use only the AGP 1X mode. However, he said that 3Dlabs benchmarked the Permedia3 Create! and found no performance deficit because the bottlenecks were found to be the setup speed and the textured fillrate and not the AGP bus speed. I guess this is because of the Virtual Texture Engine (which saves bandwidth on the AGP bus).

As you have seen in the benchmarks, the Virtual Texture engine really helped improve the texture rendering speed, which is a sign that AGP transfers are much more efficient. However, the benchmarks also showed that when textures used were very large (32MB+), the Virtual Texture engine failed to perform. Hence, it's disappointing that the Permedia3 cannot run at AGP 2X. I'm quite sure we would all see even better texture rendering speed if the Permedia3 ran at AGP 2X.

I tried asking Jean for the registry entries that would allow us to force the Permedia3 to use AGP 2X since he only stated that the compatibility problem was only with certain chipsets. However, he encouraged me not to even try to experiment with it. I guess that compatibility problem is more extensive than 3Dlabs would admit. As such, one wonders why they so boldly claim AGP 2X support in their specs sheet. :)

Odds & Ends

There's nothing much left to say about the Permedia3 Create!, so let's just check out the rest of the pictures that I have taken of the Permedia3 Create!.

Here are two pictures of the mysterious jumper settings. Of course, the jumper pins are not there but it makes me wonder why they even bother adding them if there was no use for them at all...  

The picture below (left) is of the Permedia3 Create!'s BIOS chip. Looks like another SST chip.

And on the right, of course, is the Permedia3 Create!'s oscillator (clock crystal).