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Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2

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PCQ Bureau
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Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 GTS 

Graphics accelerator card. Rs 23,500

Features: Powered by nVIDIA GeForce2 GTS; 4x AGP; 32 MB DDR memory; 5.3 GB/sec memory bandwidth; hardware transformation and lighting; MPEG 1 and 2 playback.

Pros: Superb gaming performance.

Cons: Poor software bundle.

Source: Compuage Electronics, 

21/A,  Film Centre, 68

Tardeo Road 

Mumbai 400034.

Tel: 22-4913986-90 

Fax: 4919069 

E-mail: info@compuageindia.com   
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This is the sequel to the first Creative 3D Blaster card isbased on the GeForce2 processor. With this card, Creative has decided to stickto the reference design provided by nVIDIA and has made few modifications of itsown.

Beforewe delve into how well the card performs, let’s look at some of its mainfeatures. The card has 32 MB of DDR (Double Data Rate) SGRAM. DDR uses bothedges of the clock for data transfers, thus effectively doubling the throughput.So though the chip is rated at 166 MHz, it actually runs at 333 MHz due to DDR.

The card has four texture rendering pipelines, each runningat 200 MHz. However, the effective bandwidth of each pipeline is 400 MHz as itcan render two textures per clock cycle. Thus the overall texture renderingspeed is 1.6 Gigatexels per second.

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We ran our tests using a PIII/700 MHz and a PIII/500 MHz onan Asus CUV4X motherboard. Interestingly, there was minor difference in the testresults at high resolutions and color depths, irrespective of whether it was aPIII/500 MHz or a PIII/700 MHz processor. With these high settings, it’s thedisplay card’s capabilities that determine performance.

Quake III Arena has become a de facto standard for testingnew cards. Apart from being the most popular shoot-em-up, it also has thedistinction of being absolutely ruthless on the video card. However, the 3DBlaster sailed through our tests, giving a whopping 75.7 frames per second at800x600 resolution and 16-bit color depth. A frame rate of 30 fps is consideredto be playable, but even at 1,280x1,024 resolution and 32-bit color depth, thecard surpassed this by a wide margin, with a frame rate of 42.4.

In 3DWinbench 2000–a benchmark that tests graphics andgaming performance–the card clocked 85.6 fps (1,024x768 resolution, 32-bitcolor depth). 3Dmark99 Max–another graphics and gaming benchmark–awarded theCreative GeForce 5061 3Dmarks, which is excellent. We compared these results tothe Asus V7700, also a GeForce2 based card that we recently reviewed (see PCQuest August 2000, page 162). The Creative card gave slightly better scores thanthe V7700. Compared to the earlier GeForce card, this one gives much betterperformance.

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The performance sheet

 
Creative GeForce Asus V7700 Geforce2 Creative Geforce2
Quake III Arena (fps) 1,280*1,024*16 44.9 66.5 75.6
3Dmark99 Max

(3D marks)
4,595 4,892 5,061
3D Winbench 2000

(3D marks)
51.7 83.5 85.6
Note: All results calculated using a PIII/500 MHz processor

The card is pretty simple to set up, and the drivers let youadjust lots of variables–like Direct3D, OpenGL settings, etc–to optimize itsperformance. We did, however, miss a couple of features we’d found in the AsusAGP V7700. For example, it had a utility called SmartDoctor that measures thegraphics chip temperature, fan malfunction, etc. Another thing that we missedwere games. The V7700 came with several game titles, whereas this one comes witha couple of demos only. For a top-of-the-line gamer’s card, packing some gametitles is very important. However, it did come with a software DVD Player thatwe found useful. Several cards nowadays have a TV out function to let you use atelevision instead of a monitor. Adding this feature will really add value tothe Creative GeForce 2. As far as pricing is concerned, it costs slightly lessthan the Asus V7700. Overall, it’s an ideal choice for gamers.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs

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