Wildcat VP870: 3Dlabs' price-performer.

The Wildcat VP 3D graphics accelerator comes from 3Dlabs, now a division of Creative. (Some years ago, 3Dlabs took over Intergraph's Wildcat business.) To complement its higher-end cards and build upon the Wildcat name, the company has introduced a line of mid-range cards called Wildcat VP. These hoards are aimed directly at Nvidia's high-end models, both in price and performance, and they are certainly heating up this segment of the workstation card market.

The Wildcat VP comes in four models. On the high end is the VP970 with 128MB of memory, which costs around $1000. The low end is the VP560, which has 64MB and costs under $250. The card reviewed here is the $599 VP870 with 128MB of RAM.

The Wildcat VP was designed as a workstation card first, but may be of interest to gamers as well, as it supports both OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 9. Unlike the high-end Wildcats, which can fill up two card slots, the Wildcat VP card is a simple and fairly compact AGP device. The card is sparsely populated with chips and has the requisite heatsink to cool the visual processing unit (VPU). On its front are two ports, one digital DVI, the other analog SVGA. There is also a connector for 3D shutter glasses.

The core of the Wildcat VP is 3Dlabs' P10 VPU. Most graphics cards have a single large graphics processing unit (GPU), which resembles a computer's CPU. 3Dlabs' VPU consists of many small, single-instruction, multiple data (SIMD) processors tied together in a supercomputer-like array. The Wildcat VP has over 200 of these processors on a single chip, which allows the card to parallel-process image information, theoretically making it much smoother and more responsive than a typical graphics card.

These small processors can also be split up and used for different tasks, and they can off-load tasks normally completed by the CPU. This is undoubtedly where professional 3D graphics is headed, as it allows rendering times to be cut significantly. These processors can handle anything from antialiasing pixels to calculating high-order surfaces to performing such esoteric tasks as wavelet compression and photoreal rendering.

3Dlabs claims that the card will also be easy on developers and programmers. Although the Quadro4 and FireGL 8800 feature pixel shaders, these are programmable only up to a point. The P10 VPU is fully programmable and supports such advanced features as automatic parallelization of ...