Apparently, Creative Labs decided to be the only company on the market that sells ATI, NVIDIA and also 3Dlabs powered graphics cards. It is not quite clear how the company manages to promote all its lines of graphics products at the same time, but it appears to be a fact. Creative Labs offers NVIDIA based solutions in Europe, they offer ATI based graphics cards in Asia, also accompanied by their NVIDIA rivals; in the first quarter they acquired 3Dlabs, who now offer WildcatVPs, hitting the sales of NVIDIA`s Quadro 4XGL professional graphics cards.

Today I spotted that the company has just launched its 3D Blaster5 RX9700, based on the latest ATI RADEON 9700 PRO VPU. The company known for its SoundBlaster sound cards already launched RADEON 9000 PRO card a month ago, now it is time for the high-end graphics solution.

The novelty from this Singapore-based multimedia vendor has 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory onboard as well as typical set of connectors from ATI: D-Sub, DVI-I and a TV-Out. The graphics card is clocked according to ATI`s recommendations at 325/620MHz for core/memory. Keeping in mind that currently no other makers than ATI itself offer RADEON 9700 PRO graphics cards, we can guess that those boards offered by Creative Labs are manufactured by ATI`s main manufacturing partner.

Originally, Creative Technology offered their RADEON based graphics cards only in Asia. However, t-break web-site, which issued the press-release about the introduction of the newcomer is based in the Middle-East and the PR is in English. Do they mean that Creative Labs also plans to start selling their new graphics cards in Europe or even the USA?

Well, although the attempt of Creative Labs seems to be strange nowadays, I can remember that only three years ago, the company sold NVIDIA, 3dfx and also some other graphics cards. Now almost all the vendors choose the one and only graphics chips developer and sell the whole line of its solutions. Since Creative Labs does not manufacture its graphics products itself, they can sell whatever they like. The good-old times come back.