Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro GeForce DDR

It cannot be denied that Creative Labs is one of the most influential computer component manufacturers. With products ranging from CD-ROM drives to video cards, Creative's wide product distribution and placement on almost every store's shelf make Creative Labs a computer component powerhouse. Well established in the video card market, Creative Labs originally used the new NVIDIA GeForce processor and SDR memory design in the 3D Blaster Annihilator. It was not long, however, before Creative Labs realized something that got other manufacturers thinking: why make an SDR GeForce card when DDR RAM only costs about 3% more to make? While currently RAM producers are selling DDR RAM for a premium due to its high demand, Creative Labs speculated that it would not be long before the price of DDR RAM compared to SDR RAM only reflected the 3% manufacturing cost. With this idea came the death of the 3D Blaster Annihilator and the birth of the 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro: a DDR GeForce card.

With a large advertising budget and market share, Creative Labs entered the GeForce market with a force. Not only was the 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro one of the first DDR cards on the market, it was also the first one to see its way into the local retailers hands. By holding shelf space in popular stores such as Best Buy and CompUSA, Creative Labs almost ensured its success. It was not long, however, before other video card manufacturers entered the GeForce DDR race. How does the 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro compare to other DDR cards which can take weeks to mail order? Let's begin by looking at the specs.

Specifications (courtesy of Creative Labs)

• Architecture Highlights
  256-bit graphics architecture
  32MB high-performance DDRRAM
  350 MHz Palette-DAC
  AGP 4X with Fast Writes Peak fill rate of 480 million bilinear filtered, multi-textured pixels and more than 3.8 gigatexels per second
  Up to 15 million triangles per second at peak rates
  Integrated transform, lighting, setup and rendering engines
  Four 32-bit 3D rendering pipeline 4 texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle
  Single pass multi-texturing support (DirectX®6.X and OpenGL® ICD)
  
  
• 3D Features
  Transform and Lighting (T&L) Engine Graphics performance scale with Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) not CPU
  Render with geometry instead of texture
  Four rendering pipelines capable of delivering four pixels per clock
  Cube environment mapping in hardware, fully supported by DX7 and OpenGL
  Complete DirectX 7 support 100% hardware triangle setup
  Texture Blend support: Multi-texture Bump map, Light maps, Reflection maps, Detail textures
  Backend blend 32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha Point sampled, Bilinear, Trilinear and 8-tap Anisotropic filtering
  Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping: Fog, Light, Mip mapping
  Full scene, order independent anti-aliasing 32-bit Z and stencil buffer
  
  
• 2D Features
  Hardware acceleration for all Windows GDI operations
  Fast 32-bit VGA/SVGA support
  Multi-buffering (up to quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback
  
  
• Video Support
  Video Acceleration for DirectShow and, MPEG1, MPEG-2 and Indeo
  X and Y smooth up and down scaling with filtering
  Per-pixel color keying
  Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
  Video port supports ITU- R 656
  
  
• Card Specifications
  AGP 4X with Fast Writes
  VESA DDC 2B + DPMS
  Single slot 2D, 3D graphics, and video accelerator
  NVIDIA GeForce256
  Classic graphics engine
  Integrated 350MHz RAMDAC supporting up to 2048X1536 in true color
  MPEG1, MPEG2 and full-motion video
  Motion Compensation for MPEG-2 decoding
  Full Plug and Play compliant Drivers Windows 95 and 98 display driver (DirectDraw, Direct3D)
  Drivers for Windows NT40 (DirectDraw)
  OpenGL ICD for Windows 95 and NT 4.0
  VBE 3.0 compliant