How far we have come!
Written: Nov 19 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very fast, easy to install, works like a charm
Cons: Not the absolute fastest any more
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| iann's Full Review: Creative Technology 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra, (3... |
I recently upgraded my Intel i740-based 3D graphics card for the Creative 3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 Ultra. It came in a HUGE box, which was necessary I suppose just to fit the name on. My old card was completely obsolete and no longer supported 1 year after I bought the machine it came in. Now I'm not going to quote you benchmarks and endless comparisons because there are dozens of them all over the web. They all tell much the same story, this card is very fast although not the fastest TNT2 Ultra you can buy (a couple of other makers clock their cards slightly higher straight out of the box), and it is not as fast as the Voodoo3 3000/3500 (it does do a few things the Voodoo 3 can't do, but we won't get into that argument here), or nVidia's latest geForce card. Other than that, you can't beat it.
I will just give you my experiences with the card. I uninstalled my old drivers, plugged in the card, booted my machine, pointed it to the Creative CD and everything worked first time. Note that this only installs the drivers, not the extra utilities which come with the card, more about those later. Next I went to Creative's web page and downloaded the latest drivers. This is always a good move since several versions of drivers could have been released since the box left the factory.
Creative has supplied several little utilities which can be installed very easily off the CD. One of them is Calorific. It is a utility for calibrating your display settings for very accurate colour reproduction. I went through the procedure and can't say I noticed any difference. I have a Sony Trinitron monitor, maybe it was quite well calibrated out of the box. Your mileage may vary, but this is probably only going to be really useful to professionals and people seeking very good colour reproductions for printing. There is also a 3Deep utility for setting up your display for 3D, again didn't seem to gain me much.
The driver configuration is accessible from the Windows display properties dialog. You can also have an applet in your system tray to give you direct access. The applet also gives you right-click and hotkey access to different resolutions and colour depths, as well as letting you control the "virtual desktop". This little trick lets you have a windows desktop at one resolution while your display only shows a portion of the desktop at a lower resolution. Seems to work well enough, but I don't use it. This applet also gives you immediate access to programs along with pre-configured display settings for each program. This is a very nice feature for 3D games which are sometimes finicky about running from particular desktop settings, or need the gamma to be changed. Now it all happens the way you want every time you run the game.
The configuration dialog itself gives you control over fogging, anti-aliasing, wait for vsync, mip-mapping, texture caching, and many other settings. If you don't know what they are you probably won't ever change them. Even hardcore gamers probably won't touch most of them. One setting they will want to play with is the memory clock speed, adjustable from 164MHz to 201MHz from the default 182MHz. All these settings were completely stable on my machine. To adjust the CPU clock speed, or take the memory clock above 201, you will need a program like PowerStrip. Remember you can fry your card, but if you want that much speed then the card will probably be obsolete in 6 months anyway. The card seems completely stable at 175MHz CPU clock and 202MHz memory. Push the memory higher and you get lockups. Push the CPU higher and you get all sorts of weird stuff. Again, this means your card is damaging itself so don't get carried away.
So what is the card like to actually run games? Well only the very latest games even begin to tax the card. My PII-400 is usually the limiting factor on older games and at 800x600 or less. Q3Test runs very smoothly at 1024x768x16, certainly well enough for me to play online. This is with pretty much all the "quality" settings maxed out. Pushing it to 32 bit colour improves the image considerably (eg. rocket smoke is smoother and easier to see through), but the game is no longer as fluid. Frag-maniacs will not be happy at this setting. The game will even play at 1600x1200x32, but the frame rates are low enough that you will not live long.
The other game which is great for stressing out graphics cards is Unreal Tournament. This runs great at 1024x768 with 32-bit colour, all the settings maxed out. Unreal's texture details and high polygon count don't seem to affect the card at all. At anything less than 1024x768, my measly little Pentium II seems to be setting the limits anyway.
So OpenGL, and Direct3D work great. Creative even has drivers to let you run Glide games if you really have to. Any gamer will love this card.
The 2D settings on this card allow you take the resolution and refresh rate higher than most monitors will allow. You will probably find that anything above 1280x1024, and certainly anything above 1600x1200, starts to lose a little crispness. You will want a different card if ultra-high resolution 2D is your main use.
In summary, the card is perfect for playing games and will handle 2D displays well enough for anyone short of a professional graphic designer. Very few people need more than this card provides.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
iann
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Member: Ian Nartowicz
Location: Falls Church VA
Reviews written: 62
Trusted by: 55 members
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