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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on December 26, 2001
Manufacturer: Creative
Labs Europe Product: 3D
Blaster GeForce 3 Titanium 200
Check
for the lowest videocard
prices.
 Creative
is one of the most recognized brands among PC enthusiasts
especially because of its ever popular SoundBlaster line.
They have also been major players in other areas such as
Graphics products for quite some time, and although they
retired from the
Americas
market a while ago, they have kept the
3D Blaster family alive in the European and Asian markets.
“NVIDIA
GeForce 3 Technology gone mainstream”, as some would say,
the 3D Blaster GeForce 3 Titanium 200 is based on one of
NVIDIA’s latest chips; the Ti 200 is supposed to offer the
best price/performance value, so let’s take a closer look
to Creative’s offering.
Installation
of the GeForce 3 was as hard as that of any other Graphics
cards, that is, it wasn’t. I uninstalled my previous
Graphics Cards drivers, shut down the PC & plugged it
out from its power source. Opened up the case & removed
the existing AGP Graphics card from the Motherboard. I then
inserted into the GeForce 3 into the now free AGP slot &
screwed it into place. The PC was then reconnected to the
power source & was turned on.
Windows
XP booted up normally and the Graphics card was detected by
Plug & Play then installed the latest Official
NVIDIA Drivers for the Graphics card itself when prompted.
The
Manual that
came with the Graphics card was a typical Quick Install
guide. Nothing worth mentioning about it, really. Although
no other Graphics cards I’ve used were particularly
spectacular in that area either.
As
I said earlier the GeForce 3 is a greater leap forward than
the GeForce 2 was. In reality it's probably fair to say that
it's a greater leap then the original GeForce itself was. The original
GeForce was marketed as the first (Consumer
level) T&L Graphics cards around & offering benefits
of reduced CPU usage and vastly improved graphics quality.
Of
course NVIDIA’s marketing department left out one minor
detail about this. That being Feature
Support, i.e. All these things hold true, but only
if
Developers actually support
them.
Now
as we know, support for the DirectX 7 T&L features of
the GeForce 1 & 2 have been rather under-whelming
to say the least & despite what NVIDIA’s
T&L
Supporting Games
list might have you believe most of these feature the
absolute minimum
of Hardware T&L support. For example, OpenGL by default
supports Hardware Transform routines if available, there's
no need for Developers to add support for it, it doesn't
change visual quality & the performance benefits are
minimal.
As
we can see NVIDIA’s PR Department have done a great job
promoting the GeForce range and no doubt many people did buy
these Graphics Cards on the basis of what they thought
T&L did. Now we come to the next major point - Feature
Delay.
One
of the main issues with supporting features like T&L is
that of time. Developers simply can't add support for such
features in a few days, more likely is that supporting such
features would need to be considered & actively done
from the start of the Game. This can be witnessed by the
rise in T&L support in recent times since the launch of
the GeForce.
Most
importantly about this is what it means for the Hardware
T&L features of the GeForce 3. How long before Games
really support its features? There's no real conclusive
answer to this yet, although I'd go with sooner
than you might think. Certainly it will be supported
a lot faster than the GeForce 1 & 2 was. Why?
Microsoft's X-Box.
The
X-Box uses a customized GeForce 3 chip for graphics.
Developers as a result will be optimising especially for it
as a result, no doubt this will also mean supporting the
T&L features available. As a result it's quite safe to
assume that any PC Ports of X-Box Games will be T&L
optimized, more specifically DirectX 8 optimized.
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