3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200

By David Em

December 13, 2004

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Normal human beings no longer need specialized graphics cards. Graphics board performance has doubled approximately every six months for several years, with the result that contemporary graphics cards are overkill for everything except the most advanced 3D games. But if you design films, automobiles, computer games, or realtime scientific visualizations, you still need all the graphics horsepower you can possibly afford.

Ten years ago that meant buying a Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) workstation with a proprietary graphics subsystem. That could set you back tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in the mid-90s, SGI's behemoths were obsoleted almost overnight by comparatively cheap PC workstations running Windows NT. Several graphics card developers created specialized boards for those boxes, but none held a candle to Intergraph's high-performance Wildcat series.

3Dlabs now produces the Wildcat line, and it's worked hard to maintain its position at the forefront of the increasingly competitive high end of the realtime graphics rendering field. We've tested just about every Wildcat ever made here at the Media Lab, and last month we put the latest offering, the Wildcat Realizm 200, through its paces.

Start Me Up

The graphics industry calls graphics cards Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs. The Realizm 200 also has a programmable Visual Processing Unit, or VPU, that creates photorealistic shading. With 150 million transistors, the Realizm 200's VPU silicon rivals or surpasses the complexity of even the most powerful desktop CPUs. 3Dlabs also recently released the Realizm 800, their first PCI Express card, which has dual VPUs and a Vertex/Scalability Unit, or VSU, that processes geometry.

The Realizm 200 is an 8X AGP board. BYTE.com Contributing Editor Alex Pournelle had no trouble seating the 200 in our Hewlett Packard xw8000 dual 3.06 Xeon workstation test system. The card requires an auxiliary power connection and an adjoining open slot for cooling.

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