3DLabs' P10 Visual Processing Unit - When a CPU & GPU Collide

Final Words

The first question you're probably asking is what market is the P10 targeted at? In spite of 3DLabs' acquisition by Creative Labs, the company will still remain an independent brand that will continue to tailor to the professional market. The P10 will be first made available very soon on a 3DLabs card aimed at the professional market. But the chip obviously has a lot of potential in the consumer/gaming market and indeed it will make its way down there.

This is where Creative Labs comes in; Creative will take the P10 technology and tailor it to the specific needs and requirements for the gaming market. The P10 will then be found on Creative Labs branded boards that will sell at prices competitive with the GeForce4 (or whatever NVIDIA's high-end card is at the time). While 3DLabs wouldn't give us an indication of exactly when we could expect consumer/gaming cards from Creative, they did say it would be before the end of the year. That could mean anything from August to something a bit closer to the holidays, although our money is on a release sooner rather than later.

In terms of the viability of the P10's architecture, it's definitely a very powerful chip. The goal of making the P10 perfect for higher level language programmability may be a bit overly optimistic for 3DLabs, at least in their first incarnation of their VPU technology. Although the vertex processors are clearly ready for this type of a role, the rest of the pipeline has to be just as flexible and capable which it presently is not. It will be interesting to see how their next-generation VPU on a 0.13/0.10-micron process turns out with a full DX9 compliant pipeline.

To the end user, the lack of full DX9 support may be a turnoff for many but keep in mind that the DX8 support the early adopters of the GeForce3 bought hasn't really been useful, even today.

As unexpected as 3DLabs' announcement was (we weren't anticipating it for another few weeks) it's just the first in a line of new technologies in the graphics sector.