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3Dlabs announced Monday the Permedia 3 graphics chip, the next generation in its family of 2-D and 3-D graphics processors.

The new chip, due to original equipment manufacturers by the fourth quarterr, is fully Accelerated Graphics Port- and Peripheral Component Interconnect-compatible so it will work in cards for either slot type. The boards will come with 4 megabytes to 16 MB of video memory and support up to 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Because the Permedia chip accelerates OpenGL and DirectX games, 3Dlabs is targeting the consumer and entertainment market with the chip. The vast majority of games made for the PC require either Direct 3D -- a 3-D graphics subset of DirectX developed by Microsoft -- or OpenGL -- which was developed by Silicon Graphics.

However, the Permedia chip may be incorrectly positioned because it's trying to compete with the popular Voodoo 2 chip from 3Dfx and the cheaper Riva chip from Nvidia, said Jon Peddie, president of John Peddie Associates, a market research firm in Tiburon, Calif.

"The market is so crowded, and I don't know if they are positioned to move into the game market from their traditional base -- which is OpenGL acceleration," he said.

Permedia 3 has got all the bells and whistles to be a game card, Peddie said. "It'll be received as an entry-level OpenGL board," he said. "I think that's the bigger market."

In 3-D benchmarks, the Permedia 3 chips will be as much as six times as fast as the Permedia 2 board, according to James Carrington, vice president of desktop products at 3Dlabs, based in San Jose, Calif. 3-D geometry performance will be double that of a Permedia 2 board, while the graphic fill-rate performance will range from two to five times that of a Permedia 2, depending on the video mode, he said.

Boards will initially sell for roughly $250 to $300, but will drop below $200 within six months, said Carrington. The company has not yet announced which companies will be the original equipment manufacturer licensees.

Aside from the high-speed performance, the most important improvement in the Permedia 3 chip is the ability to do multiple texture operations in a single cycle, Carrington said.

For example, in a game, a single pass would be done to draw the texture, then another pass would be needed to handle lighting and shading. With the dual-texture engine in the chip, it can do both tasks in a single pass.