August 2002 3Digest - 3DLabs Visual Processor, 128MB

This chip is presented by 3DLabs Wildcat VP870 128MB DDR, AGP card.

Features:

3DLabs VPU (P10) chip, ~220 MHz clock rate, 512-bit bus;
128MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Samsung 3.3ns chips, ~250 (500) MHz clock rate, 256-bit bus;
Hardware TCL.

3Dlabs has recently announced its new, revolutionary solution - P10 GPU, renamed to VPU (Visual Processing Unit or just Visual Processor) afterwards. We reviewed it together with a card on it. Now I'll just say that currently VPU are produced for professional applications, but we advisedly included this card into the 3Digest. Soon Creative, as a new owner of 3DLabs, plans to announced a gaming solution based on the VPU, so it was interesting to test this card with drivers NOT OPTIMIZED for games to compare the results with game drivers in the future.

There will be three cards on the VPU. Today we review the middle one - Wildcat VP870.

On the 10th of August 2002 the latest drivers version from 3DLabs is 4.23.

There are some problems: Sacrifice, Neverwinter Nights, Max Payne do not run, and Renegade reboots the system. There's some criticism about the performance in Morrowind, shown on the screenshots. The behavior in Unreal 2 (alpha) was interesting: having 1024x768 resolution in configuration files, the game run at 1920x1080 on this card. Though it's more of an advancement, as this game doesn't run on ATI cards at all.

VP870 causes a number of artefacts in a number of games:

Again, we've tested the professional card in game apps. And below you can compare the screenshots with reference images, obtained with NVIDIA GeForce3.