3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 100
by Todd Widup

Installation

Few issues came up during installation, other than that the card has a full size frame and thus requires plenty of area in the PC. It also has a 5v, 4 prong power connector to supply the required power needs, 75 watts as per 3D Labs specs.

7 out of 10, mainly for the need to have an extra power connection and the full size frame, which is needed to support the heatsink/cooling system

Maya

at 500k quads, response was still pretty interactive. a very slight delay in navigation response, but once it started, no delays from then on. with 2 million quads, navigation response was sluggish, and trying to work with the mesh was extremely sluggish. This seems to be a card and system issue.

Modeling and deformations in Maya both respond really well at moderately high poly counts. More than usable for large animation scenes with animation res characters, and for setup artists for testing deformations on high res hero characters.

One rarely mentioned feature of the Wildcat line of cards is the native support for Maya's hardware renderer if you are using a Wildcat VP880/990 or the Realizm line as well.

Modo

Modo response is even better. Manipulating a high res object was no problem, until you hit 750k or so. From there on, there was some noticeable lag times. This was with smooth shading in all viewports. Interaction with the object, pulling points, soft sculpting was pretty much the same way. With Modo's ability to lock out geometry from updating, this could be a really nice combination.

I did get a few hard reboots, these occurred in Modo when I changed the aliasing from non to 4x to fix some GL display issues that appeared in Modo only, not in Maya. When looking at a convex object, there was a slightly white edge around the edge overlooking rest of the object.

Real world applications, it gets an 8 out of 10. performance was there, and I cant directly point the Modo GL bug at the Wildcat.

Drivers

The wildcat drivers pretty much have all the same options as the other wildcat VP drivers. Support for dual monitors is the standard 3DLabs route. That is using the native Windows support while adding dual OpenGL. I would still prefer to see options similar to NVidia's NView systems, where you can have Windows see the monitors as one large desktop, mainly for some applications like Maya and Lightwave, where the native Windows format has issues with displays, namely, Maya not having access to RMB menus on the second display, and Lightwave not remembering panel positions on the second display. Even with position memory on, that doesn't help. Other than that, the drivers give you a wide range of control.

6 out of 10

Conclusion

While I really like the performance I got with this card, the price just doesn't justify it. You can get them for about 0 at some major online retailers, but for the same price, you can get a Wildcat VP990, with double the memory, though it doesn't support all the features that the Realizm does.

For price, I give it a 5 out of 10, and for overall, it gets a 7 out of 10. I just liked the performance of the Wildcat VP990 better than this one. Maybe the Realizm 200 is better.

For More Info Visit: www.3dlabs.com