OpenGL Workstation Power - Graphics Cards for the Professional User

3Dlabs Wildcat II 5110 - The Details, Continued

The Wildcat II 5110 has two independent geometry and two independent rasterizer chips. The cumulative might of these two chips is generally available for the majority of OpenGL applications, but in a dual-display configuration, the chips can operate separately.

When it comes to the number of hardware-supported light sources, the Wildcat II 5110 is the king of the hill - 24 can be handled simultaneously. The Fire GL4 can manage up to 16, while the Quadro2 Pro on the Elsa Gloria III can only take on 8 at a time. The memory allotment of 128 MB is more than sufficient and is split up into 64 MB of frame buffer and 64 MB of texture memory. In certain circumstances, while operating monitors independently in dual-monitor mode, each chip can even reserve 32 MB for itself.

3Dlabs lists the polygon rate at 15MPoly/s. At first, this might appear puny, but the Wildcat turns out to be a real performance monster. Its texel fill rate of 332 million trilinear filtered texels seems relatively paltry as well. In this area, though, the Wildcat II 5110 has been perfectly optimized for use with numerous OpenGL applications.