Wildcats in the Channel

The Wildcat II 5000 is built on the same architecture as the 5110. It has a programmable geometry accelerator, a rasterization engine that delivers 8.5 million polygons per second, 3Dlabs' SuperScene antialiasing, hardware accelerated 3D volumetric textures, and direct digital display support through a DVI connector. However, the 5000 differs from the 5110 in that it has a single rather than a dual pipeline and comes with 64mb of texture and frame buffer memory versus 128mb.

A Wildcat driver comes with the board, and ensures compatibility with numerous 3D applications, including Alias|Wave front's Maya and Studio Tools, Autodesk's AutoCAD, Discreet's 3ds max, NewTek's LightWave, Softimage XSI, and PTC's Pro/ Engineer. The 5000 supports Pentium III and 4 and AMD Athlon-based systems with AGP 4X slots. The estimated price for the Wildcat II 5000 graphics card is less than $1400.(3Dlabs; www.3dlabs.com) -JD