SCIENCE

3Dlabs Inc., Ltd., a leading innovator in professional visual processing, today announced unprecedented power and performance capabilities for professional graphics with the PCI Express-based Wildcat Realizm 800. The fastest professional PCI Express-based graphics accelerator that will hit the market this year, the Wildcat Realizm 800 features a unique Wildcat Realizm Vertex/Scalability Unit (VSU) and dual Wildcat Realizm Visual Processing Units (VPU) to deliver over 700 GFLOPS of floating-point graphics processing. This doubles the raw graphics performance offered by any competing professional graphics solution. The Wildcat Realizm 800, and the AGP 8x-based Wildcat Realizm 100 and 200 announced today all deliver industry-leading programmability to OpenGL Shading Language and Microsoft DirectX 9.0 HLSL shader programs. The Wildcat Realizm 800 is slated for availability in the third calendar quarter of this year at an MSRP of US$2,799. 3Dlabs is a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd. “3Dlabs Wildcat is back with a vengeance. The dual VPU-based Wildcat Realizm 800 realizes the full performance potential of PCI Express,” said Hock Leow, president of 3Dlabs. “We demonstrated the Wildcat Realizm 800 for our OEM customers and they were all blown away by its performance; their only question was ‘how soon can we get it?'" “PCI Express ushers in a new level of graphics performance to Intel architecture based client and workstation platforms,” said Jim Pappas, director of technology initiatives for Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group. “Intel plans to work closely with 3Dlabs to ensure that key 3D graphics software vendors achieve the incredible power of PCI Express to deliver a new level of professional graphics performance.” Wildcat Realizm 800 Features The 16-lane PCI Express-based Wildcat Realizm 800 graphics accelerator doubles raw geometry and fill-rate performance over any single processor graphics solution. Wildcat Realizm 800 has a total of 512-bit bus to 512 MB GDDR3 graphics memory. Wildcat Realizm 800 also integrates 128 MB of onboard DirectBurst™ memory to transparently store commands and geometry data for boosting geometry-intensive applications for an amazing total of 640 MB of onboard memory, delivering over 64 GB/second of total graphics memory bandwidth. Wildcat Realizm 800 powers through the Viewperf 7.1.1 UGS-03 benchmark with an unprecedented and unmatched score of greater than 80 frames per second making it the ultimate ultra high-end professional graphics solution. Wildcat Realizm 800 also drives two, dual-link DVI-I connectors and a stereo connector. Field Upgradeable Framelock and Genlock Support The Wildcat Realizm Multiview Option Kit integrates 3Dlabs’ fifth-generation Genlock and Framelock capabilities for seamless synchronization between displays and systems for visual simulation, virtual reality and broadcast applications. To add Framelock and Genlock capabilities to the Wildcat Realizm 800, the kit offers an interface card, which occupies the space of an additional slot, and includes both a jumper cable to connect to the graphics accelerator and a six foot Framelock cable. Available in third calendar quarter of this year, the kit has an MSRP of US$650. Professional Functionality Wildcat Realizm consistently delivers professional-level features across the entire family. * Advanced Floating-Point Processing: Wildcat Realizm graphics accelerators process up to 128-bit pixels with full 32-bit floating point per component accuracy for the highest color fidelity. 128-bit pixels can be seamlessly converted to and from 64-bit pixels with 16-bit floating point per component accuracy to provide a full floating-point computing environment with optimized storage requirements. 64-bit pixels can be directly displayed without the need for conversion. * Extended Virtual Memory: Wildcat Realizm technology supports an extended virtual memory space up to 256 GB for leveraging the capabilities of 64-bit systems. With full graphics memory demand paging, designers can effortlessly manipulate larger models faster than ever before. * Industry’s- Largest Shader Program Storage: Fragment shaders of up to 256 K instructions with full flow-control, can be effortlessly executed from virtual memory. * Sophisticated Texture Access: Shader programs can access up to 32 textures simultaneously to efficiently process a large number of inputs in a single pass. * Reliable and Quiet Thermal Operation: An innovative self-contained thermal solution provides quiet and reliable operation in any system chassis by enclosing the air space of a second slot to create a highly efficient air flow. Acuity Driver Suite 3Dlabs Acuity™ drivers deliver professional-level OpenGL 1.5 support, including an optimized OpenGL Shading Language compiler on both Windows and Linux®, together with full DirectX 9.0 HLSL (Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 3.0) support on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Acuity drivers will also be available with full 64-bit drivers for Windows XP and Linux in the third quarter of 2004.