A Creative Labs representative told in the interview published at this web-site, that the company currently has no plans to introduce graphics cards for consumer’s sector based on the P10 VPU originally developed by 3Dlabs. It was also made clear that Creative Labs Europe has strong relations with NVIDIA and is very confident in their solutions, including the up and coming NV30. European subsidiary even does not want to offer ATI RADEON 9000/9700 based products for its customers since NVIDIA constantly helps to push and promote graphics cards based on their GPUs and is well-recognised on the market.

Frankly speaking, P10 falls behind the NV30 in terms of some features as well as estimated performance, however, it does not seem to be the real reason, why Creative decided to go with its partner from Santa Clara. Relative performance and features are not the main explanation why people buy certain new graphics cards, so to say. Generally, customers buy reliability and ability to play somehow on most of today’s games, view video and experience crisp 2D. For instance, KYRO II and Matrox graphics cards are far from being champions in 3D speed, but they are accepted by the market quite well.

I believe that P10 works rather fast in today’s games and can provide pretty normal performance. However, there may be some problems with drivers that can be not as stable and error-free, as offered by NVIDIA. Moreover, the latter is known and recognised among the end-users – Creative Technology will not have to advertise the new products! Meanwhile it would be quite tough to push P10 technology now and compete with both the RADEON 9700 and NV30 today. Moreover, if they fail now, they will hardly be able to enter the market with 3Dlabs’ future solutions, which are expected to come in 2003. Take a look:

As you may notice the next-generation architecture, probably based on the original P10, will offer numerous of more advanced features. According to the table, the next-gen 3Dlabs part will be, at least, as feature rich as NVIDIA’s NV30, maybe it will also contain certain 3Dlabs’ proprietary features that will make it even more attractive.

I want to point our that 3Dlabs acquisition was a pretty wise decision of Creative Technology, by the way. I will offer you two parallels from the history of Creative Labs:

• E-mu has always been a famous developer of professional sound equipment, including samplers and synthesisers. They merged with Creative Technology in 1993. In mid-nineteenths the rolled-out EMU8K sound chip that was rather popular, they brought the famous EM10K synthesiser chip in 1998 that was utilised on the Sound Blaster Live! sound cards, they eventually introduced the Audigy and Audigy 2 chips, bringing Creative Labs to the top. E-mu continues to offer its professional equipment.
• Cambridge SoundWorks have been developing hi-fi acoustic systems and is quite popular vendor of home-theatres and other similar devices. After it was merged with Creative Labs, they helped the latter to develop their consumer’s acoustic systems that probably are among the best in their price-class. Cambridge SoundWorks continues to offer its own products.

As you see, Creative Technology knows what to buy and for what – you can be sure that the guys from 3Dlabs will roll-out something really interesting sometimes in future and will continue to provide powerful professional solutions under 3Dlabs brand-name.