LOSTCIRCUITS

Conclusions

It is certainly different, reviewing a professional graphics card, than reviewing game graphics adapters. One thing we did not touch upon is the image quality / accuracy that may be slightly better in the case of the Wildcat but differences are really nothing to write home about.

Aside from the image quality, in many ways, the Wildcat VP990 has been a bitter pill inside a candy, first it tastes sweet but then it hits you. The card in its present form suffers from a number of severe imperfections, at least some of which appear to pertain to a fill rate that brings us back to the time of the original GeForce256.

In that respect it appears to be particularly the multitexturing in Direct3D applications that suffered. It is rather obvious in the Final Reality screenshots that the original textures of the buildings were applied correctly but then, the superimposed pictures of Max Payne and whoever his female companion is, are just shredded.

Of course, this could be anything, starting from a simple glitch in the script to a flaw in the card itself but the issues are also present in the form of picture tearing at its worst.

The major turn off, however, was the discrepancy between the material presented by 3DLabs regarding some of the technical specs and the reality that simply did not even get close to those specs. It is certainly challenging to equip a graphics card with 512 MB frame buffer and then still try to run at some 300 MHz clock rate and we can appreciate that technical issues could arise here.

Memory clock rates of 150 MHz have hardly been around anymore since the GeForce2 days and the motivation for going with the probably lowest speed grade of Samsung memory is plain and simply nebulous. Given that the price delta between the B3 and the C4 or CC versions is approximately 50¢ per chip, in this case, the total savings in manufacturing costs amount to approximately US$8.-

Considering the massive performance increases that we have witnessed by just cranking up the memory speed, the current solution appears even more paradoxical. However, memory components are not the only issue that plays into stable operation here. Shielding issues and / or trace configurations, potentially a move to a better quality PCB with more layers could also be required for enabling the 20GB/s memory bandwidth that sure would be nice to have and that, very likely would speed up the entire card by some 15-50% depending on the application. Unfortunately, the memory components used are 16M x 16, otherwise I would have just mutilated one of my DIMMs and reworked the card myself in order to shed some light on the matter. One other thing that needs to be emphasized is that the material that we got the 20GB/s bandwidth from was original 3DLabs, that is, dating from before they were acquired by Creative Labs.

It makes you wonder. Eight US$.... How much is that again compared to the purchase price?

We rest our case.

In honor of the Wildcat VP990 we still have to mention that the card is very fast if used in the appropriate applications and even more so in light of its memory frequency. Very interesting in this respect is also that we were able to achieve frame rates in excess of 500 fps in e.g. Dual Planes. The interesting aspect here is that at 1024 x 768 pixel resolution, this would require a minimum of 393 Mtexels/sec, which none of the benchmarks shows.

Special Thanks to Rahul Verma and IG8 Media for his invaluable input (he may not even know that we sucked half of his brain dry and then restored the original contents) and help in getting this review together.

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