Creative Labs and Nvidia

What to look for on shelves

The last, great TNT2 vendor?

One of the biggest news items over the last month was the surprise acquisition of Diamond Multimedia by S3, makers of the self-admittedly non high-performance Savage3D and Savage4 graphics. While there are a number of dedicated and professional TNT2 vendors in the market, Diamond was arguably THE big name player, and their position had decidedly and suddenly changed.

While Diamond is still currently under contract for TNT2s, this leaves Creative Labs as the sole remaining graphics behemoth. While this is good news for the upcoming Nvidia NV10 GPU (and remember to take all reports on its purported September availability with a grain of salt), the TNT2 market is still a hotbed of excitement and activity, and smaller vendors such as Hercules and Guillemot have been able to carve themselves very successful niches by providing smaller shipments of higher speed, higher grade cards.

Staying with a big name

So what's the benefit of going with the big boys? Well, it's the same story. Volume shipments allow for lower overall prices, and bigger companies have to ensure compatibility to minimize return rates. This is the primary reason you won't see a Creative 175/200 product, but it also means Creative will be striving to make their cards as stable as possible on a wide range of systems.

This is all good news, but what everything comes down to is whether or not Creative has a good product in the 3Dblaster TNT2 Ultra. We've heard a lot of hype about this card, from RAM speed to overclocking claims to everything else, and we're here to dispel the myths behind the product.