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Page 2

The Mission

I thought the most difficult part in this saga was deciding whether to purchase a GeForce or not - but that was not the case. No computer store could keep them in stock and all cards were usually out the door with happy faces within the same day the stores placed them on the shelves. It took 4 days, many phone calls and plenty of wasted time to track one down. Microcenter here in Denver, Co had eight in stock when I called but I couldn’t pick one up because there was a power-outage in the area and they were refusing customers. So I gave them my name and they promised to hold one for my pickup in the late afternoon. I called around two in the afternoon to make sure they still had one on reserve for me and the store was down to three in stock. The customer service desk could not reach the hardware department to verify my request. I finally made it down to Microcenter by 4 PM and picked up the second last Creative Labs Annihilator Pro Video card.

Installation and Test Drive

Removing my old TNT2-Ultra and installing the Creative Labs Annihilator Pro proceeded without any problems. As usual when I install new hardware I reformat the drive and install the OS from scratch – in this case Windows 98 OSR2. People cringe when they see me reformat my drive for any new hardware upgrades but performance and stability issues are often caused by old drivers lurking somewhere in the chaos Microsoft calls the system registry files.

Deciding to use nVidia’s reference drivers was a mute point since the drivers shipped with the Annihilator Pro were engineered from the most current reference drivers. OS & driver installation went without any problems and the first programs I installed were the ones supplied with the Annihilator Pro. Dagoth Moor, the Zoological Gardens, which uses the new T&L (transformation and lighting) hardware features of the GeForce was quite simply put, breathtaking. I have never seen such 3D graphics and this was all processing in real-time. If you were once a classic Amiga owner you knew how to appreciate the GeForce when it took almost 24-hrs to render a single simple frame on a stock Amiga 500. The Annihilator Pro was rendering the frames in the Dagoth Moor demo at over 30fps at 1024x768 with 32bit color!

I installed every current generation video game I could get my hands on. Titles that used to be "sluggish" on my TNT-2 Ultra performed "glass-smooth" on the Annihilator Pro at 1024x768x32. I was impressed and I hadn’t even overclocked the video card at this point. Overclocking a video card is a little more risky in my opinion compared to CPU’s because at least the motherboards will send out alerts when temperatures run to high. No such luck on video cards. You run the card too hot and it simply dies – most often, permanently. Nevertheless I overclocked the card to the maximum settings without any problems. I let Quake 2 run through several iterations for almost an hour and opened my case and touched the video card to see how hot it was. To my surprise the card was barely warm to the touch and so I have been running the card fully overclocked at this point without any problems. Yes, I am sure the video card is enduring wear and tear above and beyond recommended speeds at these overclocked speeds but I will be upgrading to a next generation video card long before the Annihilator Pro decides it’s time is up.

Even Windows 98 behaved much faster. To be more specific, windows, icons and applications moved more fluidly across the display.

There were a couple of times during gameplay when the screen did pause and I can attribute that to my low end CPU being unable to compute the data fast enough for the GeForce. These pauses were extremely rare and nothing compared to my TNT2-Ultra.

Thoughts and Conclusion

You may have gathered by now that I am very impressed with the Annihilator Pro. To answer the question if it is worth upgrading or not, you need to test drive the card on your system and see how it performs. Benchmarks are very important for laying out certain guidelines for you but ultimately you need to determine for yourself how the GeForce DDR performs on your system. My plans were to test the card and simply return it to the dealer if the card failed to my expectations.

If you are asking yourself if it is a good time to upgrade then the answer is - it never a good time because there will be always something better on the horizon. Fortunately none of the other video processor manufacturers have anything comparable in store for the next 3 to 4 months. 3dfx’s new Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 video cards are all hot air at this point. Several web sites have posted interviews with 3dfx about the new Voodoo4/5 technology and it sounds rather unimpressive. 3dfx talks about being able to process two pixels/cpu cycle. Hello, is there anybody there? TNT= TwiNTexel which translates into two pixels/cpu cycle. This is the good old TNT, TNT2 and TNT2-Ultra. Also 3dfx has no plans to design DDR ram based Voodoo4/Voodoo5 cards at this time so you will be bottlenecking the video ram rather quickly. Last but not least the Voodoo4/Voodoo5 will not be supporting T&L which I think is a huge mistake. Taking transformation and lighting away from the main CPU means there will be plenty of breathing room for other work to be done which to me is a natural progression in 3D video technology. Also at this time it looks like the Voodoo4/Voodoo5’s are not going to make the planned April launch date. It’s too early to tell but last I heard was the chip designs have not even been pressed to silicon. All they have are proto-types.

What does this all mean? Hopefully six months or more life out of the GeForce before it’s time to upgrade.

For me the impression I received from installing the GeForce was like using a new computer. As I’ve stated several times, you need to try it on your system before deciding to keep the card. Good luck trying to find one. For a technical review on the Creative Labs Annihilator Pro read Mike Chamber's review of the card over at nV News.

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