Gift giving ideas

[Thing]

3DLabs ships 256MB Wildcat VP880 Pro
By Tony Smith
Posted: 30/04/2003 at 14:08 GMT


3DLabs has released its Wildcat VP880 Pro workstation graphics card with 256MB DDR SDRAM across a 256-bit bus. The card is capable of generating 188 million vertices per second and 35 billion anti-aliasing samples per second, the company said.

The card operates in a single AGP 4x or 8x slot - unlike other 256MB solutions, which require AGP Pro or two slots, claims 3DLabs. The card provides two DVI-I ports driven by two 370MHz, 10-bit RAMDACs.

The card retails in the US for around $499, rather less than its companion card, the VP990 Pro, which is due to ship this month for $899. The VP990 offers 512MB of SDRAM. It can produce 225 million vertices per second and 42 billion anti-aliasing samples per second.

The cards run under Windows XP and Windows 2000, and support DirectX 8.1 with Vertex Shader 1.1 and Pixel Shader 1.2, and OpenGL 1.3.

Both cards are based on 3DLabs' VPU chip, which contains an array of 208 32-bit Risc-like sub-processors - 128 dedicated to floating-point texture processing, 16 to floating-point geometry and the remaining 64 to integer pixel calculations, including anti-aliasing. ®

[Naem]

Eh, i'd like to see it in benchmarks vs the Radeon 9800.

[Yoni]

Hmm, never heard of 3DLabs. ATI and nVidia are currently the king and queen (respectively) of 3D accelerator processors. So, as Naem said, where are the benchmarks?

[Thing]

3DLabs has been producing video cards for a long time.  The reason most people have never heard of them is because they don't produce mainstream "gaming" cards and they are insanely expensive.  They focus mostly on CAD freaks and the like.  I got turned on by them when they were first pushing the Oxygen series.

Even if they aren't worth a crap for gaming, you can always tell your friends that you spent more for your video card than they spent on their whole system.  It's the American way.

Note to self: Self, find benchmarks.

[Etheran]

Hmm, never heard of 3DLabs. ATI and nVidia are currently the king and queen (respectively) of 3D accelerator processors. So, as Naem said, where are the benchmarks?

sorry, Yoni, you have it backwards (ATI drivers are buggy)

[dxoigmn]

sorry, Yoni, you have it backwards (ATI drivers are buggy)

nVidia's lastest drivers for its FX line are buggy as well.  In fact, ATI has the better video card by today's standards.