Virtual Textures and Powerthreads

What are "Virtual Textures"?

Virtual Textures is a technology that the Oxygen GVX1 utilizes to essentially provide more texture memory. Although the Oxygen GVX1 already has 32MB of texture memory, which seems like a good deal for a gaming card, remember that we are dealing with a high-end piece of work here, and 32MB is not enough. Virtual textures allows the card to use its onboard texture memory as a cache for textures that are actually stored in the system memory. Since a high-end graphics workstation (or any machine, for that matter) could easily have 1GB of RAM or more, we have many more textures stored.

Thus, the textures are stored in their entirety in the system memory. When a certain texture is needed, then, it is retrieved from the system memory. However, the whole texture is not retrieved. Instead, the GLINT R3 chipset determines how much of the texture is needed based on what the scene that is being rendered looks like. If the entire texture is not visible in the scene, then the GLINT R3 will break up the whole texture and use only the parts that are needed.

Powerthreads - pimp clothes?

Ok, that was DUMB. It's hard to make high-end graphics hardware humorous, ok? Powerthreads are actually 3dblabs' OpenGL drivers that are additionally optimized for SSE. They are officially called "Powerthreads SSE OpenGL drivers", so the name is quite appropriate. Powerthreads allow for better performance in a multiprocessing environment. Powerthreads balance the load of geometry and lighting calculations between the GLINT Gamma G1 geometry lighting accelerator and one or more CPUs. If you think about it, this makes sense. Why would you want to rely entirely on the onboard GLINT Gamma G1 geometry accelerator if you have a CPU or two sitting idly?

Thus, in SMP environments the Oxygen GVX1's performance scales nicely. Being optimized for SSE also helps out a bit. Powerthreads drivers are a nice solution and innovative way to improve performance for the Oxygen GVX1 by divvying up the transform and lighting processes. The Powerthreads drivers are not new; in fact, they have been around the Oxygen line for quite some time now.