The Wildcat II 5110 and 5000 graphics cards from 3Dlabs are two tremendous products for the 3D artist. There are many good graphics cards available to the 3D animation professional. These include the Nvidia Quadro 2 and Quadro DCC based cards, ATI's Fire GL series, and 3Dlabs' Oxygen GVX1 and GVX420. How do these products differentiate themselves? The main areas where they focus their efforts are graphics processing chipsets, memory architecture and drivers. (In September's review of the Quadro DCC we looked at how graphics cards work.)

Formerly the workstation graphics card line from Intergraph (which 3Dlabs acquired last year), the Wildcats have a great lineage. The Wildcat IIs are stable, fast and reliable. Both are physically huge cards -- filling the entire length of the test machine's ATX case. They occupy the AGP slot and the empty PCI slot below it for purposes of heat dissipation. (Neither card boasts cooling fans; instead they rely on heat sinks. Be sure your case has serious cooling before adding one of these monsters.) The 5110 is hungry for power -- its AGP Pro50 interface allows it to draw up to 50 watts. The 5000 runs on the more common AGP 2.0 standard and consumes less power.

Installation
Installing a Wildcat II card is a straightforward process. First, uninstall the previous card's drivers. Next, power down, unplug and open the case. Then, replace the old card with the (did I mention, monstrous?) Wildcat II. Close the case, plug it in and fire it up. When Windows asks for drivers, point it to the drivers that 3Dlabs provides on CD. After one more restart you are ready to go.

The Wildcat II 5110 card. This physically huge card is hungry for power. All images © 3Dlabs, Inc

Once installed, the Wildcat II control panel allows you to select optimized settings for all of the major 3D animation programs, as well as manually fine-tunes them. After 10 minutes of back-and-forth between the control panel and your 3D software it is possible to tune it to your own optimal speed vs. quality settings. For example, the better looking the full scene anti-aliasing, the slower the framerate. These tweaks can be saved as a new preset.

Wildcat II 5110 Impressions
Before we go any further, I'll get this out of the way: the Wildcat II 5110 is the best graphic card I've used to date for OpenGL 3D content creation. It is packed with 128MB of RAM split between frame buffer and texturing, can drive two monitors simultaneously without a hitch and is fast. As in four times faster than the previous Wildcat 4110! It obliterated the synthetic and real-world benchmark tests and made working in Maya, 3ds max, Softimage XSI and Lightwave a pleasure.