Ya Baby
Written: Oct 06 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent FPS, good price, you can not ask for any thing else
Cons: None
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| PKM_Assassin's Full Review: Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator |
When God created 3D video games, he meant them to be played on this card!
We are talking multi-textured pixels, more than 3.8 gigatexels per second, over 15 million triangles per second, four 32-bit 3D rendering pipelines and single pass multi-texturing support. Toss in 32 Megs of synchronous RAM and a 350MHz DAC, ruh-ruh-ruh Tim Allen would be proud.
This was the first card that gave shivers down the back of 3DFX share holders. Usually, games designed for the 3DFX API, for example, Unreal & Unreal Tournament, run poorly on any other card but 3DFX (Voodoo); DirectX support is just tossed in as an after thought. By poorly, I mean you usually have to turn down the “eye candy” and expect FPS (Frames Per Second) to be about half of that on the same system that is running a Voodoo.
My test system is a PIII 600 with 256 Megs RAM, running Windows 2000, a modest system by professional gaming standards. From the first time I tried UT on this card I was impressed. I turned up all “eye and ear candy” to max and set the display to 1024 * 786 @ 100 Hz ( I set the Hz via a Power Strip preset). I averaged over 60 FPS in the UT fly by!!! For once I was out performing a Voodoo based systems.
A few of my clan mates ran our systems on a 3d benchmark application called 3dmark2000 (you can download from www.download.com) and these are some of the results:
My system total score: 3453
System 2 : PIII 500, 256MB RAM, geforce DDR, Windows 2000: Total score: 2718
System 3 : PIII 850, 256 MB RAM,Voodoo3 3000, Win 98: Total score: 2880
System 4 : PIII 600, 128MB RAM, TNT2 Ultra, Windows 2000: 2641
System 5 : PIII 800, 128 Megs RAM, Voodo3 3000, Windows 2000: Total Score 2721
System 6 : PIII 800, 128 Megs RAM, geForce 256, Windows 2000: Total Score 3700
As you can see, the Blaster Annihilator out performed every system except for one, which is also running a gForce 256 based card. Many of the systems had much higher CPU speeds. Many of you Voodoo fans will say that a new Voodoo 5000 based card could give these numbers a run for there money, but then so could a 3D Blaster GeForce2 Ultra, but that is a different review.
As for the bottom line, the 3D Blaster Annihilator is a rock solid card, with excellent FPS and supported refresh rates. I would highly recommend this to any game player looking for a, “not quite leading edge, but damn close”, serious, 3D card.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 285.00
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Epinions.com ID:
PKM_Assassin
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Location: Ontario, Canada
Reviews written: 26
Trusted by: 10 members
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