Wildcat Realizm 800: 3Dlabs' latest innovation meets the needs of high-end users.(Product/Service Evaluation)

This year, PCI Express truly has taken the graphics community by storm. The technology, although less than one year old, already is poised to replace AGP as the standard graphics bus for the PC. As such, a whole new crop of graphics cards has been released to take advantage of the technology. Now shipping, 3Dlabs' Wildcat Realizm 800 brings the Wildcat line of cards to the PCI Express bus. The Realizm 800 takes advantage of PCI Express to provide excellent performance.

3Dlabs has been in the graphics business for quite some time, and the Wildcat line of cards has a stellar past, starting its life under Intergraph and continuing with 3Dlabs to the present. Wildcat cards have historically been at the cutting edge of technology, and the Realizm 800 is no exception. This new card lives up to its lineage and is, without a doubt, one of the fastest cards on the market today.

Two visual processing units (VPUs) and a vertex/scalability unit (VSU) for geometry processing, as well load balancing, drive the Realizm's graphics performance. This card has a whopping 640MB of RAM, which should be more than enough for most applications. The RAM is divided into 512MB of fast VPU RAM and 128MB of RAM for the VSU to cache instructions and geometry. All RAM in the system is GDDR3, which provides good throughput.

In terms of size, the Wildcat is the SUV of graphics cards. The card is not only full length, but also double width. The extra width is needed for the massive heatsink and cooling duct attached to the card. Make sure that the inside of your system has enough room for this large graphics card. I installed and tested the Wildcat board in a Hewlett-Packard xw8200 dual-Xeon workstation, and it fit like a glove.

The Realizm 800 requires a 16x PCI Express slot, which is the standard for graphics cards. In addition to the PCI Express connector, the card requires additional power through a standard four-pin power connector. The card itself draws about 150 watts of power, so be sure to have a beefy power supply. On the back of the card sit two DVI ports, as well as a stereo connector. For those who work in real-time and video applications, 3Dlabs sells a Multiview add-on card to provide genlock, synchronized framebuffer swap, and synchronized refresh rate. It enables a card to sync with video, or multiple cards in multiple machines to operate in concert.

Software and drivers are provided on a CD, ...