First off....3Dlabs, expensive card...why?Once upon a time if you wanted to do any kind of 3D work you'd have to get a system from one of three companies;
Silicon Graphics (now SGI)
Evans & Sunderland (now mainly military & bespoke systems)
or the Digital Equipment Corporation.
In the early '90s, x86 PC based systems began to catch up with these companies in performance and were surpassing them in price.
This was mainly due to the fact that several companies had been developing specialised cards that accelerated certain calculations, the big players being Intergraph, E&S and 3Dlabs.
So as you can see, this company has been around for a while and arguably has the best concentration of 3D industry experience around.
In the past six years, we've seen companies like 3Dfx, PowerVR and Nvidia hogging more and more of the spotlight, and if these cards are faster than hugely expensive professional offerings why would we even bother to spend out on these 2 foot long dinosaurs?
The answer is simple: High end 3D offerings still excel at their target market.
You attempt to run quake3 or Max Payne on a 3Dlabs oxygen, it will look pretty abysmal.
Run up a REAL application like Softimage or ProCDRS and watch it scream.
These cards are built for accuracy, reliability and when faced with manufacturing a real-life object from a computer model that apparently has holes in it from bad video board drivers, speed becomes a secondary issue.
Whats' In the box, please? One graphics card, an installation leaflet, a DVI-VGA adaptor a driver CD and a bonus CD.
...ooo...but what a cool-looking box it is!Yep..3Dlabs have always had the nicest-looking video board boxes. Period.
Installation Painless. The board is based on the same design as the PNY quadro-4 based cards, being a fairly small card mounting a permanent heatsink/fan combination.
The board works fine under standard and 1.5v AGP slots and supports up to AGP 4x transfer rates.
Drivers Driver installation simply involves running the self-extracting driver package. Its' worth noting that the unified updates for the whole VP range are only a 3mb download, so its not too stressful for a modem!
The driver supports hardware OpenGL accelerated dual views, allowing the one card to drive two monitors at once. This is where the DVI-VGA adaptor comes in handy. All wildcat VP cards support this dual view accessory.
There are multiple profiles fine-tuned by 3Dlabs for various applications including 3Dsmax, Softimage|XSI, maya, lightwave and Mcad/ProCDRS.
The card can be set to 2x, 4x and 8x FSAA (with 2x and 4x supporting quincunx sampling although 3Dlabs proprietry methods produce better results) in the driver control panel to work transparently with most applications.
Stability As a very new product (mine arrived barely 3 weeks after the official launch), there are bound to be teething problems.
However compared to other cards' i've had experience using (ELSA Gloria Synergy Quadro 2 boards and a FireGL 1000pro) the initial two driver releases as well as the one i'm currently running have been remarkably stable.
Benchmark(eting) Ahh..benchmarks. While they don't tell you everything about a card I suppose most people only care about performance.
Now you'll notice i'm using oldly versions of most benchmark programs. This is because, in my opinion, later versions of 3Dmark (especially) have shown suspicious results under different conditions.
Spec_viewperf is an OpenGL benchmarking program that is pretty much above suspicion - especially as SPEC is a non-for-profit organisation that is the de-facto standard for Mainframe and supercomputer benchmarks, among other things.
Machine Specifications3Dlabs Wildcat VP 760
Dual AMD Athlon MP 1ghz
Tyan Tiger MP rev 1 (BIOS 1.03)
512mb Crucial ECC Registered PC2100 memory (CL 2.5, batch no.CT3272Y265.18T)
Adaptec 29160n SCSI 160 Adaptor
2 IBM Ultrastar LZX SCSI 160 10,000rpm drives
LG CEB 32x4x4 CDR/w
Afreey 10x DVD
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value
Windows 2000 service Pack 2.0 w/DirectX 8.1 (not a clean install)
Note that windows was not a clean install. You could expect benchmark scores to go up slightly from a minimal installation due to more memory getting freed up.
The card was set to MAX_GEOMETRY, this essentially means more of the onboard processing capability was given over to T&L than to actually shading and mapping the polygons. a MAX_FILLRATE setting would have impacted the Spec_Viewperf scored but 3Dmark probably would have flown.
3DMark 20003490 3D marks
Not much to say here, I don't know what this means and as I only rarely play games I don't much care either.
Spec_Viewperf 6_1_2 ---------- SUM_RESULTS\AWADVS\SUMMARY.TXT
AWadvs-04 Weighted Geometric Mean = 135.0
---------- SUM_RESULTS\DRV\SUMMARY.TXT
DRV-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 15.65
again, test did not display anything except a few clipped polygons.
---------- SUM_RESULTS\DX\SUMMARY.TXT
DX-06 Weighted Geometric Mean = 32.33
---------- SUM_RESULTS\LIGHT\SUMMARY.TXT
Light-04 Weighted Geometric Mean = 6.903
---------- SUM_RESULTS\MEDMCAD\SUMMARY.TXT
MedMCAD-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 26.72
---------- SUM_RESULTS\PROCDRS\SUMMARY.TXT
ProCDRS-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 65.63
To give you an idea of how horribly fast this card is, My GVX1pro kicked out about 25 on the first test and a Wildcat II 5000 can manage about 55.
Note the VP had a problem on the second test, however the visual quality put out by the card in the others was at least as good as i've seen.
The 2D quality of the card was of surpassing excellence.
More to follow......later.
