What’s Hot: Blazing fast frame rates, 32bit color is rich, built on GPU, DDR Ram.      
What’s Not: As always updated drivers will help performance, Pricey.  


Finally you can let your processor take a deep breath. Creative’s Annihilator Pro takes your system to the next level. Why? Lets start with the DDR Ram, this little wonder allows a transfer rate that surpasses standard sdram on most graphics cards today. Yes it is the same size as the standard Creative Annihilator toting 32megs, but the DDR Ram shows enormous performance gains at higher resolutions compared to brother. As most of us know higher resolutions allow you to view the total area in your game, but generally speaking your frame rates suffer. Not with this card I found myself running Unreal Tournament at 32bit color at 1600x1200 resolution and I must say it ran smooth.
At lower resolutions 800x600 at 16bit color it was harder to notice the difference between the Annihilator Pro and its older brother the Creative TNT2 Ultra, but they were there. Frames were just slightly faster at this resolution on the Annihilator Pro. What else makes this card special well folks lets not forget that G-Force 256 GPU, this puppy takes weight off of the processor by handling the Transform and Lighting effects that are generally handled by your computers CPU. This allows your CPU to take a deep breath. Think of it as having a separate processor on your graphics card. Now the color is amazing at 32bit and looks richly detailed the way it should, however in certain games you might notice some fuzziness in scenery. Don’t fret to much about this because as with any graphics card this will be fixed as newer drivers are released.
I generally am a difficult critic but I must hand it to the folks at Nvidia and Creative they have done a great job with this card. It comes with a decent bundle of software to show off the cards features. It comes with dvd software for those of you who have a dvd drive and fast enough system ( 400mhz at least for best effect), but I would suggest acquiring Cinemaster DVD software since it is the best out there. The price tag is a little high but if you are a hardcore gamer this is definitely the card for you. So strap yourself in and prepare to fly with this card.
Take the Dragons advice and visit Creative’s Website at www.creative.com  and for real untainted benchmarks go www.tomshardware.com . Until next time gamers keep Fragging.





Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 289.99