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Introduction
The 3dfx Voodoo2 resulted in great success for Creative Labs when it was released. Then came the nVidia TNT and TNT2 that brought equally great success. Creative Labs now offers a new 3d accelerator named the GeForce Pro and suffice to say, not all generations of video cards provide the leaps in technology that we expect. So what does the 3D Blaster GeForce Pro have to offer?

The Creative Labs GeForce Pro is a high speed 2D/3D video card solution based upon the nVidia GeForce 256 chip. It uses a .22 micron chip that was previously code-named the NV10 and contains 23 million transistors surpassing even that of the new Intel P3 Coppermine CPU's.

It is the heart of the chip that is also known as the worlds first Graphics Processing Unit which takes the transform and lighting calculations and processes them instead of the CPU having to do so. It leaves the CPU to get on with other important aspects such as artificial intelligence. The nice thing about T&L is that games using OpenGL and Direct X 7 can utilize this feature so programming games for T&L in future will be very easy to implement through these two API's.

Probably the most outstanding feature of the GeForce Pro is it's use of the high bandwidth Double Data Rate Ram that is manufactured to run at an impressive 300mhz memory clock speed.

This gives us a maximum memory bandwidth of up to 4.8 GB/second transfer which is nearly double that of SDRAM. Some of the other impressive features include:

What do you get?
The bundled software is probably more of a deciding factor than many people would like to admit, after all the whole idea of a software bundle is to show you what the card can do.

Bundled software includes;

• Evolva Scout (OEM demo)
• nVidia High IQ sampler CD (showcase the cards T&L)
• Win98/NT 4.0 drivers (including Colorific and 3Deep colour calibration software from E-Colour)

The software bundle with the GeForce Pro was rather poor mainly because the Australasia / Pacific consumers receive a "Cut Down" version of what the Americans and Europeans enjoy. A better bundle could mean better sales for Creative especially since the GeForce Pro does not include TV-OUT. The colour calibration features are really top notch however, this is one are in which Creative excel.

Installation
Installation of the GeForce Pro was as easy as plug in and play, I received no problems here.

I chose in the end not to use Creative's provided drivers because the release revision was 3.43 and the current detonator revision is at 3.68. I also trust nVidia's reference drivers to give maximum performance after owning a TNT2 and seeing what they were able to do with those drivers was amazing. The latest Detonator drivers can always be downloaded here.