Wildcat VP990 Pro: 3Dlabs piles on the video memory.

Competition in the 3D hardware market has been fierce over the past few years. ATI and Nvidia have been fighting it out in the consumer space, and this battle has crossed over into the professional workstation arena as well. Another contender, 3Dlabs has long been a major player in the professional space. Now a division of Creative, 3Dlabs unveiled the Wildcat VP series, its answer to the less expensive but still powerful cards that have been flooding the market of late. In fact, the Wildcat VP line brings a new architecture and terrific quality to price-competitive workstation cards. The VP990 Pro ups the ante by including 512MB of video RAM, more than any card currently on the market.

The VP990 Pro fits in a standard AGP slot and has the same heatsink and fan found on other VP series cards. The heatsink isn't terribly large, but it makes for a tight fit when there's another card in the top PCI slot. It's best to leave this PCI slot open, as the heat-generating VP990 Pro needs all the air it can get. On the back of the card are two DVI connectors as well as a stereo jack. For those using CRT monitors, two DVI-to-analog connectors are included as well.

The software included with the card installed flawlessly. 3Dlabs provides its own control panel for adjusting and tweaking screen resolution, as well as OpenGL and monitor settings. The OpenGL panel comes with a number of presets custom-tuned for most major 3D applications. When first using the card, I did run into a few problems with screen refreshes using the default OpenGL settings. These problems showed up both on the desktop and in applications such as 3ds max from Discreet. Switching to the 3ds max settings on the OpenGL control panel cleared up these issues and I had no further problems.

The VP990 Pro's whopping 512MB of video RAM is great for anyone using large amounts of textures in their work. It also should help those who run high-resolution or multiple monitors. The card supports the new 9-megapixel displays from vendors such as IBM and Hitachi, as well as high-resolution dual monitors. Users creating content for feature films and HDTV will be very pleased with the results. I found images and color to be crisp and clear, due partly to the card's 10-bit RAMDACs and its good-quality drivers.

The core of the Wildcat VP is 3Dlabs' P10 visual processing unit (VPU). Most graphics cards have a single ...