What the hell is a 3Dlabs Wildcat VP990 Pro 512MB AGP 4x/8x?

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Doug

Is this a vid-card made for graphics designers/ACAD professionals? Is it any
good for gaming? Does 3dLabs make any gaming video card chipsets?
 
Doug said:
Is this a vid-card made for graphics designers/ACAD professionals? Is it
any good for gaming? Does 3dLabs make any gaming video card chipsets?
Click to expand...

Yes to the first question, no to the second, and no to the third. They're a
specialty video card not for gaming.
 
It sure is an expensive card though. Why wouldn't they try to sell it to
gamers? It has to have some sort of 3d accleration capablities? Why limit
your market?
 
Doug said:
Is this a vid-card made for graphics designers/ACAD professionals?
Click to expand...

The GPU's design actually predates the Radeon 9700 / Geforce 5800. As such
it does not have full floating-point capability throughout the pipeline. See
http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/p10tech/
Is it any good for gaming?
Click to expand...

The hardware is, but the drivers are not optimized for gaming. CAD and DCC
place different demands on the card, with emphasis on geometry performance.
Apps and games involving large textures and complex vertex- and pixel shader
operations will suffer on this card.
Does 3dLabs make any gaming video card chipsets?
Click to expand...

This chipset is as close to "gaming-level" as it gets for 3DLabs.
 
That link was an interesting read -- especially the bit about Creative Labs
buying out 3DLabs. Is it possible Creative Labs will bring 3DLabs GPU's to
the consumer market as competition to Nvidia/ATI?

I remember the high hopes for the S3 Savage4 GPU/chipset. There used to be
four 2 five competitors in the 3D vid-card arena: S3, 3DFX, Matrox, Nvidia
and ATI. Now there's only two. Has Matrox given up the ghost?
 
Doug said:
That link was an interesting read -- especially the bit about Creative
Labs buying out 3DLabs. Is it possible Creative Labs will bring 3DLabs
GPU's to the consumer market as competition to Nvidia/ATI?
Click to expand...

That article was from June, 2002. Creative-branded video cards disappeared
from North America after the Geforce2 (remember the Annihilator2?). The
company obviously hasn't done much to bring the 3DLabs technology to the
consumer market in the last three years, either.

Also noteworthy is the supported DirectX pixel shader level of the VP990:
v1.2. Feature-wise the thing is not much better than a Geforce4. For CAD
applications it's not much of a drawback. In modern/upcoming games it'll be
struggling.
I remember the high hopes for the S3 Savage4 GPU/chipset.
Click to expand...

The business later got acquired by VIA, which probably made a lot more money
selling notebook graphics chips than S3 ever did with the Savage4.
There used to be four 2 five competitors in the 3D vid-card arena: S3,
3DFX, Matrox, Nvidia and ATI. Now there's only two. Has Matrox given up
the ghost?
Click to expand...

You forgot PowerVR and Rendition. Remember the "Conspiracy Project" that was
to add hardware T&L to Rendition cards? Matrox is doing what it always did
best: supplying expensive cards to 2D graphics professionals.
 
Great cards for CAD/CAE & medical imaging software packages, but they've
never listened to the professionals that enjoy playing games once in a
while...
They seem a bit slow in the mid-range prof. market, only their highest
Wildcat card is PCI-Express, probably one of the most powerful prof. card
available out
there("http://3dlabs.com/products/product.asp?prod=293&page=6").

I've come to the conclusion that until 3Dlabs changes its mentality (I
begged them for years to get DirectX support in their drivers), I'll be
sticking to Nvidia QuadroFX's for CAD/Gaming solutions (too many bugs with
the FireGL on certain MCAD software's).
 
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