Ready, Aim, Fire – The Target Market
| It is often said among hardware reviewers that gamers are, by far, the most vocal of the visitors to sites like AnandTech. Very rarely do you hear from professionals or users interested in getting the best professional performance out of their computers, generally the first things asked for when talking about a video card are Quake 2 frame rates. While this is quite unfortunate for the users that simple don’t care about fragging on a work night or haven’t a clue what the letters CTF mean, the fact of the matter remains that unless one expresses his/her opinion, he/she can’t be heard. With the internet, it’s very difficult to be taken seriously, when in a sea of Quake 2 benchmarks asking for the performance of a video card on a high-end, professional application, is almost unheard of in the hardware benchmarking scene. |
3Dlabs took it upon themselves to change the way professionals had to deal with satisfying their needs from both a professional and gaming standpoint. Instead of waiting for the demand to be made vocal, 3Dlabs gave those that demanded, a voice. 3Dlabs is a company that has always tailored to the needs of the professionals, with their cheapest cards ranging in the $500 - $1000 range, you don’t often see 3Dlabs products accompanying many Compaq or Packard Bell systems that are for sale in retail environments. Only recently has 3Dlabs attempted to bridge the gap between the professional and the gamer, their most recent concoction prior to this latest release, was the Permedia 2 graphics chipset.
When AnandTech took the first look at the Permedia 2 almost two years ago 3Dlabs had put out one of the first graphics cards to require a heatsink on the chip itself. An amazing addition to a graphics card, it was clear that the Permedia 2 was a unique creation unfortunately from the perspective of most gamers, it didn’t pack the punch that 3dfx and NVIDIA were providing with much more affordable accelerators. From the professional’s point of view, it allowed one computer to function as a fairly powerful workstation as well as the occaisional game station after all the work was done with. Following up on the apparent success of the Permedia 2, 3Dlabs decided to improve on the features that put the Permedia 2 behind the competition that just recently grew to match it in high-end 3D performance.
The Permedia 3 was designed with the, as mentioned before, professional by day, gamer by night market in mind. Never did it cross the minds over at 3Dlabs to pit the Permedia 3 head to head with a TNT2 or a Voodoo3 in terms of gaming performance alone, and such a comparison would be incredibly unfair to 3Dlabs as the Permedia 3 isn’t solely a gamer’s card. With that in mind, the Permedia 3 isn’t a solely a high-end solution, meaning that any comparison without addressing the card’s gaming strengths and weaknesses wouldn’t be doing the card justice either. By understanding those two stipulations, we’ve successfully defined the target market for the Permedia 3, professionals by day, gamers by night.
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