Wildcat Workstations

摘要

For a number of years, the Wildcat graphics card was considered the de facto standard for OpenGL accelerators. The Wildcat was originally designed by Intergraph, but 3Dlabs purchased the technology a while back and now manufactures the chips and cards. Subsequently, in May of 2002, 3Dlabs was acquired by Creative, maker of the consumer-level Soundblaster card. Sometimes it's hard to keep up on who owns what in this business, but regardless of who's currently producing them, the Wildcat cards are still at the cutting edge of OpenGL performance. Unlike consumer cards, which are optimized for gaming and DirectX, Wildcats are built from the ground up with OpenGL in mind, and they fully support the OpenGL standard. Many consumer cards tend to skimp on OpenGL features, such as clipping planes. And while they'll work in most applications, there are places where the low-end cards fall short.