X-bit labs

Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 (GeForce2 GTS) Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by FastSite

[ 06/26/2000 | 12:00 AM ]

Another graphics card on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS. This piece from Creative, which developed GeForce2 GTS referencedesign, has every chance to become a bestseller due to the cost lower than by its competitors.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Overclocking
  
• Installation and Drivers
  
• Performance
  
• Conclusions
  

Creative Labs Company is so well known that there is no need to introduce it to you. However, the company became a popular graphics card manufacturer only 2-3 years ago, and before that we knew it as a sound card (Sound Blaster) developer. Although they were also producing graphics cards, modems and video signal capturing boards, none of them could boast the same popularity as Sound Blaster. And today launching a new 3D Blaster piece has become an ordinary event for us. Creative graphics cards have been lately known for their reliability, high quality software and relatively low prices. Another fact proving Creative's recent success is NVIDIA's decision to entrust Creative with the development of a reference design for NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based board.

As we have just said, the users are also attracted by rather low cost of Creative products. Besides, it has already turned into a certain tradition that Creative products are practically the first to appear in the market. Unfortunately, this time the company started selling its NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based cards a bit later than its main competitors for some reason. That is why we managed to get 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 only now, when some other reviews of this product have already appeared on the Web.

When we saw the graphics card, the first pleasant surprise was the cost: $297, while the cost of all its counterparts was $25-30 higher. This gave us every right to suppose that the absence of these graphics cards in the market had to do with the unwillingness of most retailers to let this product enter the competition, which could have spoilt the sales of other previously supplied graphics cards of the same type but sold at a higher price. Nevertheless, Creative graphics cards appeared in retail and we sincerely hope that they will stay up to the mark as usual.

So, let's take a closer look at another graphics card from GeForce2 GTS family - Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2, which is already available in retail.

Closer Look

Here is the list of Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 (known as the 3D Blaster GeForce2 GTS in Europe and Asia) main features:

• NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, 256-bit GPU
• 25 Million Polygons/sec, 800 Million Pixels/sec
• 350MHz RAMDAC resolution up to 2048x1536
• 32-bit Z-buffer/stencil
• Display Modes:
  
  

  Resolution	Colors	Vertical Refresh Rate
  640x480	8/16/32 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  800x600	8/16/32 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  1024x768	8/16 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  1024x768	32 bits	60Hz to 200Hz
  1152x864	8/16 bits	60Hz to 200Hz
  1152x864	32 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x960	8/16 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x960	32 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1280x1024	8/16 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x1024	32 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1600x900	8/16 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1600x900	32 bits	60Hz to 120Hz
  1600x1200	8/16 bits	60Hz to 120Hz
  1600x1200	32 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1080	8/16 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1080	32 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1200	8/16 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1200	32 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1440	8/16 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1440	32 bits	60Hz to 75Hz
  2048x1536	8/16 bits	60Hz to 75Hz
  2048x1536	32 bits	60Hz

We won't discuss the peculiarities of GeForce2 GTS GPU from NVIDIA in detail, because we have already devoted enough time and effort to it in this Review.

Now here is the today's piece:

The card has AGP 2x/4x interface, 32MB 6ns DDR SGRAM located in 8 chips on both sides of the PCB.

The memory chips are made by Infineon and should work at 166MHz.

And they do work at this frequency. Note that sometimes the end clock frequency of DDR memory given is twice as high as it actually is, because these numbers look more impressive. However, it hardly matters for real practice. In other words, if you see that DDR memory working frequency written equals to 333MHz, then you should read it as 166MHz.

Further examination of the PCB showed that the graphics card hardly differs from the reference design. The chipset is equipped with an ordinary active flat cooler sending the airflow sideward. There is no daughter card with a TV-Out on the piece we had at our disposal. The PCB is of vivid green color, which is Creative's distinguishing feature. The PCB is already equipped with a connector for a daughter card with a TV-Out and has a special empty spot for digital monitors connector.

The graphics card is supplied in Retail package in Creative traditional box (with a slightly modified outer design).

The package includes a user's manual, a CD-disk with the drivers and utilities, a CD-disk with software demo versions and a CD-disk with Rage Rally game supporting Hardware T&L. Unfortunately, the accompanying software doesn't include a DVD-player, which is a bit perplexing.

Overclocking

To our great disappointment, this graphics piece failed to show super overclockability. The chipset could reach the maximum of 220MHz and the memory - only 375MHz. These results are quite modest especially keeping in mind beautiful results shown by the previously tested graphics cards. Nevertheless, we still hope to get a certain performance gain since the memory working frequency grew from 333 to 375MHz, which promises a considerable growth of performance in 32bit color. We have already pointed out in the previous reviews that a combination if a fast graphics processor and a relatively slow memory with the end clock frequency of 333MHz makes the graphics card a very ill-balanced device.

Installation and Drivers

And now we are going to speak about some practical things. At first take a look at our testing system configuration:

• Intel Pentium III 733MHz CPU;
• Chaintech 6ATA4 (VIA Apollo Pro 133A) mainboard;
• 256MB PC133 system memory;
• IBM DPTA 20GB HDD;
• ViewSonic P810 (21'') monitor;
• MS Windows 98 SE.

The work with the graphics card usually starts with the drivers installation. So, we will also start here. For our tests we used the drivers from Creative version 4.12.01.0522 (based on NVIDIA ver. 5.22 drivers):

As you can see, the drivers design has undergone very noticeable changes. Creative tried to separate the drivers from various additional utilities, which are now combined into one single package called Creative Blaster Control. Here is a "new face" of Blaster Control v.4.0, which lets you access different settings. Among them are:

This is an overclocking utility. Unfortunately, you can increase only the memory working frequency (not that of the chipset, that's why for overclocking we used PowerStrip utility in our tests).

Here you can change the AGP port settings and the monitor type.

These properties pages contain all Direct3D settings. They correspond to those existing in NVIDIA drivers, including enabling and setting anti-aliasing mode.

These properties pages allow setting the card's performance in OpenGL. Here you can also enable anti-aliasing.

And finally, here are the sliders to correct the color gamma.

You can access all options either via the display properties or via the manager, which icon is situated in the lower right corner of the system tray.

Performance

Well, we will start with 2D-graphics. In the previous reviews we have mentioned perfect quality and high performance in 2D shown by the cards based on GeForce2 GTS. Now we can only state that Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 proved up to the mark in 2D (it is the similarity to NVIDIA reference design that tells). Graphics cards of this kind meet the requirements of the absolute majority of users.

We will work with the following two games to consider the performance of Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 in 3D-graphics:

• Rage Expendable (Direct3D, multitexturing);
• id Software Quake3 v.1.16h, demo002 (OpenGL, multitexturing).

These two tools should be quite enough to give us a good idea of the graphics card's performance when working via two main API. For a more illustrative comparison we added the results shown by two more graphics cards to our charts: ASUS AGP-V7700 and NVIDIA reference card based on GeForce2 GTS. We will also show the performance of the overclocked Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2.

You can see pretty well that Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 runs almost neck and neck with NVIDIA reference Quake3 and Expendable. However, the performance shown by the overclocked card appears much more exciting. The performance gain is quite tangible (despite relatively small overclocking). Note that Creative graphics card worked with standard cooling (there was just one more cooler in the system block). Of course, we can't generalize the results shown by this graphics card and refer them to all cards based on GeForce2 GTS (besides, we don't think there is any other graphics card overclocking so poorly :), however, we still have some hope that overclocking fans will find a nice piece for their needs.

The package we received didn't contain any DVD-player. That is why we used WinDVD 2.1 to test the DVD-video playback. The results were very encouraging and good. The image quality was just perfect (which has become typical of the graphics cards of this type) and the CPU utilization didn't exceed 28-30%.

Conclusions

So, this Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 piece is a mass product and the cards from this family are already available in retail. The tests showed that it didn't yield to the reference card from NVIDIA. Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 is an exact copy of NVIDIA reference design and unfortunately, this piece has rather mediocre overclocking potential. However, the major advantage of this graphics card unlike the entire GeForce2 GTS based society is its low price: the lowest of all! So, the user can now buy a card on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS for the price of NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR from the first shipments. No doubt, the price will keep falling, which will reduce the price gap between the graphics cards on NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR and the analogues of the today's hero. We would like to stress that the card's overclockability depends on the piece that is why we wouldn't dare say that poor overclockability of our piece gives us a good idea of the entire family.

Highs:

• Super high performance, which corresponds to the today's most powerful accelerators;
• High quality card design and implementation;
• Relatively low cost;
• Rich set of the accompanying software (including a modern game supporting Hardware T&L).

Lows:

• No digital monitors connector;
• Low graphics chip overclockability;
• No DVD-player included.