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Today in DCC Workstation
3D
Graphics Cards for DCC
Intro,
Why Accelerate?, What
to Look For, PCI vs. AGP
Entry-Level,
Low-Cost, High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $300 Cards
Mid-Range,
High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $1000 Cards
High-End, Maximum
3D Acceleration: Cards Over $1,000
HP
VISUALIZE-fx2+, -fx4+, and -fx6+, Intense3D
Wildcat 4000, Intense3D Wildcat
4105, Intense3D Wildcat 4110,
3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210, 3Dlabs
Oxygen GMX2000, ELSA GLoria
XXL, Evans & Sutherland Tornado
3000
Intense 3D Wildcat
4000
 Though
not the newest offering from Intense3D, this card can still be found as
a high-end graphics option in many workstations on the market. No doub,
as newer products hit the market and prices come down, the 4000 will be
replaced by the Intense 3D 4105 and 4110, but for now, it is still the
main professional 3D graphics option in systems from the likes of Dell,
Compaq, and IBM.
The Intense3D Wildcat 4000 is ideal for advanced 3D performance in animation,
MCAD and MCAE applications. The card architecture is based on a RenderGL
2D GDI and a 3D graphics subsystem with DirectBurst technology for optimizing
the 3D graphics pipeline and significantly boosting advanced 2D and 3D
rendering performance. The boot VGA is with a Cirrus chipset. The RAMDAC
is 170MHz and the bus Interface is 2x AGP.
Intense3D's DirectBurst graphics architecture not only speeds up graphics
tasks through advanced DSP technology, but also yields system-wide performance
improvements. DirectBurst enables direct burst transfers and buffering
between various components of the graphics subsystem to minimize use of
the CPU, main memory, and system buses. This frees the CPU and memory
to perform other tasks, while conserving bus bandwidth and reducing bottlenecks.
The Wildcat 4000's 3D graphics high-performance features include a highly-tuned
3,000-MFLOPS geometry engine with a single custom chip (ASIC) dedicated
to transformation and lighting, a large dedicated 16 MB SDRAM frame buffer
and 64 MB texture memory (standard) with double buffering enabled, providing
bilinear and trilinear MIP-mapped texturing with full 32-bit texels. Wide,
independent buses connect frame buffer and texture memory to the graphics
chipset for maximum performance.
The Wildcat 4000 graphics chips, developed by Intense3D, provide acceleration
of the complete OpenGL pipeline, including all geometry operations, triangle
setup, texturing, and pixel operations. The Wildcat 4000 also specifically
accelerates the following features in hardware: matrix transformations;
full lighting calculations (up to 8 lights); 2D and 3D vectors; 2D and
3D triangles; rectangle fills; BitBlit (screen-to-screen copy); anti-aliased
vectors; get block (screen-to-system copy); put block (system-to-screen
copy); fast window mode double-buffering; alpha blending; masking; fog
effects; texture mapping; stenciling; Z-buffering; fast window clears;
clipping and put bit map (for drawing text).
In addition, the Wildcat 4000 supports all standard graphics APIs, including
OpenGL, 2D GDI, and RenderGL. It has 10-bit gamma correction, four video
look-up tables, eight stencil planes, eight overlay planes (double-buffered),
and 32-bit Z buffer at resolutions up to 1 M pixels - 24-bit Z buffer
at 1.3 M pixels. The high-performance DACs directly drive display devices.
The card supports YUV-to-RGB color conversion, hardware cursor, DDC2B
Display Data Channel standard, DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling),
multiple display configurations, and the frame sequential and interlaced
stereo required for head-mounted displays and shutter glasses.
Lead
on to the Intense3D Wildcat 4105
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