Board Configurations

The table below goes through some of the key features and specifications of the Wildcat VP boards:

Some of the specifications listed are interesting and even contradictive to the apparent flexibility of the architecture, and these bear a little more explanation.

In the case of DirectX Pixel Shader support given the inherent programmability of the pipeline you may expect there to be greater support for Pixel Shaders than PS1.2. However the support is presently limited to this purely due to driver development -- PS1.2 is the minimum required for DirectX 8.1 compliancy and isn't substantially different for PS1.1, which currently has the most available application support. Should more support for other Pixel Shader types become apparent then new routines for the drivers can be written as needed that expose these features via the Wildcat VP cards. Similarly, it was mentioned in the P10 technology preview that 200 hardware lights could be supported, however only 24 appear on the card - this is purely down to reasons of speed as the more lights are requested the more times the program is looped through and hence performance decreases; should there be a particular need for more lights then the functionality could be provided by 3Dlabs.

As an example of the programmability of the pipeline 3Dlabs will also be offering an nVIDIA style Quincunx mode alongside the standard FSAA modes in the initial driver set despite the pipeline having no native (hardwired) capabilities for it; although they say they aren't particularly impressed with this method of AA they recognise that's its fairly well known now and decided to provide a program for this so that it will be included as a driver option. Although the specifications only detail 4X FSAA I did notice that 8X was available in the DirectX control panel when using a PC equipped with a Wildcat VP board. Also, although Anisotropic filtering is not one of P10's 'hardwired' filtering methods support for it will be provided in the initial drivers -- when I asked to what level (or degree) 3Dlabs say that it probably doesn't bear any direct correlation to other implementations current available, which may indicate the 'keystone' sampling patterns also mentioned in the P10 preview.

The video playback support is another area in which the programmable elements of the pipeline have been put to use. Rather than supplying specific hardware for video processing elements such as motion compensation, color space conversion and scaling and filtering all of this is achieved via the programmable pixel processor in a manner which ensure no frames are dropped. This does also raise the interesting possibility of providing full streamed video sources as a texture map which could be seamlessly integrated into a 3D scene; 3Dlabs have indeed experimented with something along these lines already.

Although we can begin to extrapolate some clock speeds from the the performance specifications 3Dlabs remained coy as to the exact speed the parts will have when asked and stated they wouldn't, at least at this juncture, be releasing that information. However, they let one interesting piece of information slip in saying that different parts of Wildcat VP's pipeline will be clocked at different speeds - when I quizzed them further about it they stated that this would go beyond the parts that you would normally expect to have different clocks, such as such as the RAMDAC's.