3D texturing on 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm800 640MB

Greetings,

My application renders 3D textures (8-bit, GL_LUMINANCE). I use an 8-bit palette/LUT through dependent-texture lookup, implemented using ARB_fragment_program. This works just fine on NVIDIA and ATI cards.

I recently tested on a 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800 with 640MB.
The performance is however pathetic on this $1,700 “ultra high-end” card. It is 4-5 times slower than GeForce 7800, and Radeon X1800. For textures larger than 512x512x512, it seems to fall back to software rendering (15-20 seconds per frame!) and sometimes locks up my PC so bad that I have to power off!

I would appreciate feedback from users who are more familiar with 3dlabs cards. Do you think the performance would improve with a different implementation of the texture-lookup? say, a GLSL fragment program. I’d rather not spend time experimenting if the prognosis is not good.

many thanks,
Maniam

sorry for not being able to give you the hint you are looking for, but the Wildcats drivers do not cope with all possibilities of OpenGL command chains. The card is very fast in terms of geometry performance but textures are a different kind of thing. Sometimes weird artifacts appear sometimes it simply gets slow.

Comparing with a 7800gtx or xt1800 is not fair, because the design of the wildcat is somewhat older and especially the 7800gtx is a huge step forward compared to the 6800 ultra.

I would simply suggest swapping the card against something else, remember that 3DLabs has quit the workstation sector a few weeks ago.

Matthias

Originally posted by Matthias:

…remember that 3DLabs has quit the workstation sector a few weeks ago.

What are you talking about? It does not seem reasonable for them to quit that. Unless they are going out of business… :eek:

Matthias is right, they go to mobile 3D, straight from the horse’s mouth :
http://www.creative.com/press/releases/welcome.asp?pid=12341