3DLABS Oxygen 402 - Manual (Page 58)

52 Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 3D Family
PowerThreads
™
Technical Overview
In order to provide the fastest 3D graphics performance, it is vital that
3D graphics hardware and software be tightly integrated and
optimized. Dynamic Pictures, the only 3D graphics card company to
design, develop, and manufacture its own graphics chips and
accelerator boards, is in the ideal position to leverage this integration
from the initial product concept through execution. The result is the
new PowerThreads technology for multi-threaded OpenGL.
PowerThreads technology enables users of multi-CPU systems to
utilize existing computing resources to accelerate geometry
transformation. In a standard dual CPU configuration, the CPU is over-
worked while processing all geometry transformation requests for the
Oxygen chips (Figure 22). Thus, the graphics card does not benefit
from the combined power of both CPUs. However, PowerThreads
technology automatically enables the Oxygen 3D Family of cards to
take full advantage of the new breed of multi-processor PCs. In its
simplest form, PowerThreads-enabled drivers intercept the OpenGL
requests and give them to each CPU to process in parallel (Figure 23).
Coupled with the multi-chip Oxygen architecture, each host CPU can
now simultaneously communicate with multiple Oxygen chips. This
new technology increases rendering and texture mapping performance
by alleviating bottlenecks in the graphics pipeline.
The PowerThreads architecture is particularly appealing to multi-
processor system users who work with 3D graphics applications that
are written for only one CPU. Even if an application is not multi-
threaded, PowerThreads technology delivers multi-threaded
performance. For example, when a quad processor Oxygen 402 card is
installed in a dual processor system, PowerThreads technology enables
each CPU to concurrently feed data to two Oxygen chips, so all four
Oxygen chips render in parallel. The performance gains are
independent of the way in which the application is written.
The PowerThreads architecture is designed to leverage integrated
hardware and software resources in order for you to rocket along in the
bottleneck-free zone!