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Introduction
The video adapter market has been exploding forward over the last 18 months or so as hardware 3D acceleration is embraced by consumers. One of the major players is NVIDIA, who have been no slouches in launching new chipsets and regular driver updates to keep the hordes of first-person shooters, flight simulator and driving simulation addicts happy. I was quite content with my TNT2U-based card for a while - then NVIDIA launched the GeForce which took the world by storm but before I got around to upgrading they launched the GeForce2 GTS. Now, before I'd managed to finish reviewing this GeForce2 GTS-based card, they have announced their GeForce MX product which also looks to be a winner.

Creative were one of the first to market with the GeForce2 GTS chip, in the form of their 3DBlaster GeForce2 GTS. This follows closely on the heels of their GeForce Pro card which we reviewed here some months ago. That card was widely accepted as one of the fastest, if not THE fastest, of that generation of cards. Only time will tell if this latest card from Creative holds its own among the rest of the GeForce GTS2 cards.. incidentally, in the US market this product is called the "Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 GeForce 2 GTS". In Australia the "Annihilator" moniker is dropped, as it was with the original GeForce card.

Features and Layout
The card layout is standard fare for video cards these days. A flat heatsink and fan cools the GPU (the main graphics chip) while the ram, on both sides of the board, is left to cool itself via convection. The ram itself is the popular 6ns Infineon DDR SGRAM, clocked at an effective 333MHz (166MHz DDR) by default.

Click for larger images of the card front and back..

No extra features such as TV-Out or hardware monitoring are on this model but this is not an oversight - Creative made it pretty clear in their press releases that they were aiming to make this card the cheapest on the market while retaining their commitment to quality. The software bundle is also unremarkable - WinDVD2000 is a nice inclusion, but the emphasis seems to be more on demos that show off the card's abilities rather than games to entice a purchase.

Speaking of which, the demos are quite spectacular. One in particular, a spinning ball showing the reflection of the room it's in, with textures you can turn on and off etc, all rendered in real-time, simply blew me away. Another, showing a rippling pool of water with a light you can play with, dipping it into the water, watching the reflections etc, was equally impressive. Of course, we'll have to see how much of this kind of thing is implemented in real games, but the capabilities available to the game-programming companies really are staggering.

You do get 32MB of DDR RAM (allowing 16-bit colour depth at 2048x1536), AGP 4X support, Fast Writes support and of course the stonking power of the GeForce2 GTS chipset itself - this is not a crippled card by any means. I'm going to spare you a page full of feature and specifications, either of the chipset in general or this card in particular. If you're interested in a technical dissertation of what the GeForce2 GTS chipset brings to the table, I recommend this AnandTech article. For a list of the card's specifications, check this page on Creative's site.

Let's get straight into the benchmarks. On the next page I compare the card to a TNT2U card and a GeForce SDR card..