Does Creative's GeForce cut it?
Written: Apr 07 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low price, Great name
Cons: Not a huge performance leap from the TNT2U, lack of a software bundle, no TV-Out, Hard to find at local stores
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| smoke23's Full Review: Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator |
Creative's slogan for their GeForce line is: "The 3D Blaster® Annihilator™ combines the best 3D chipset available - the GeForce256™ from NVIDIA - and Creative's award winning engineering and design to create a graphics accelerator that is truly at the head of the class." First let me start off by saying this is the half-truth. Yes the GeForce chip is the best graphics chip around, but Creative was really unable to produce a card that was ahead of its class.
Creative makes two versions of the GeForce card a DDR(double data rate) and the SDR(single data rate). I will be focusing on the SDR version. The SDR refers to the speed of the memory. The SDR's memory is clocked at 166Mhz and the DDR is clocked at 150mhz x 2 which yields 300mhz, this helps in performance.
Installation:
I didn’t have too much trouble installing this card in to the AGP slot, but I did run into some problems while I was installing the drivers. The computer would not recognize the card once I installed the drivers which makes me feel that the drivers that Creative prepared were not mature. So this meant putting my old card in and down loading and installing Nvidia’s reference drivers. This is a pain and Creative should have gotten all of these bugs fixed before releasing the card. The reference drivers worked perfectly. Always get Nvidia's reference drivers.
Performance:
From all the hype that has surrounded this card I am a little biased. The card performs well, in most situations. I ran into some subpar performance in UT. I was never able to get above 40 frames per second on any resolution setting or graphics mode. This concerned me being that I just bought a state of the art graphics card and my frame rate is lower than a TNT2U. To test whether it was the drivers, I tried the new version of Creative's drivers. There was a difference but Nvidia’s were better. This was the only game that I ran into trouble with, all the others ran with high frame rates.
DVD:
The card supports DVD playback, which runs well. No real problems in the quality. The card did come with WinDVD, which is one of the best software decoders. The version doesn’t support the Annihilator’s motion compensation capabilities, but Creative has released an upgrade to WinDVD, which does incorporate motion compensation. The card lacks a TV-Out so you have to watch all of yours movies on the monitor.
Does Memory Matter:
Yes memory definitely matters, the DDR outperforms the SDR when the resolution goes above 1024X768 with 32bit. color other than that, the two versions perform similar.
Conclusion:
The card performs as well as the other cards out on the market. The card lacks a software bundle; it only comes with a couple of demos that are not very good. The card is priced to sell at $170-250. But good luck finding one. My local Best Buy sold out of them in Dec. and they have not received a shipment since then. If you are not a hardcore gamer and are looking for a cheap GeForce that will tide you over till the next great card, then this is the card for you.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
smoke23
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 3 members
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