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Creative
Labs3d Blaster GeForce3 Ti500
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Author : Wayne
Date : 24th September 2001
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3DVelocity would like to
thank Creative
Labs and especially Rosie Tickner of ProdigyPR for their
help and courtesy in providing this graphics card for review.
| ...Product |
Creative GF3 Ti500 |
| ...Manufacturer |
Creative
Labs |
| ...Supplier |
Creative |
| ...Price |
£332.53
(From Creative)
£289.99 (From Jungle)
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Introduction :
My relationship with Creative Labs is one that
stretches back further than I care to remember. From the SoundBlaster
pro back in 1990 to today's Audigy, from the original 3D Blaster
back in 1996 to the GeForce3 Titanium 500 I'll be looking at
today. Like most long term relationships it has cost me a lot
of money and has brought hours of frustration as well as hours
of joy. Fortunately the days of 50 polygon scenes and the hours
of trial and error to get sounds in your favourite game are
gone, yet Creative Labs remain still one the biggest names in
multimedia for the PC.
For a while Creative seemed to be backing away
from the cut-throat 3D graphics card market, and though they
no longer manufacture the cards themselves, there's still something
reassuring about the Creative branding that bolsters the product
inside the box.
The card I want to look at today is the 3D Blaster
GeForce3 Titanium (Ti) 500. Built around NVIDIA's flagship Ti500
GPU which has a claimed capability of 960 billion operations
per second and 3.8 billion AA sub-pixel samples per second.
Coupled with an impressive 8GB/sec of memory bandwidth this
card should push out some serious numbers.
Let's kick off with a look at the specifications
:
Architecture Highlights
- 64MB 500MHz Double Data Rate (DDR) Memory
- 960 Billion Operations Per Second
- 35M triangles/sec
- 8.0 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
- 4 anisotropic filtered pixels/clock
- 3.84 Billion Samples per Second FSAA Fill Rate
- TV and DVI - Output
- nfiniteFX Engine for full programmability
- Lightspeed Memory Architecture for unmatched performance
Specification
- 256-bit graphics architecture
- AGP 1X, 2X and 4X support, including Fast Writes and Execute
Mode
- Memory configuration 64MB of DDR Memory @ 500Mhz
- 240Mhz Core Clock Speed
- 350Mhz RAMDAC
Programmable Vertex Shaders
- Procedural deformations
- Programmable matrix palette skinning
- Keyframe animation interpolation
- Morphing
- Fog effects: Radial, Elevation & Non-linear
- Lens effects: Fish-eye, Wide-angle, Fresnel effects, &
Water refraction
Programmable Pixel Shaders
- Phong-style lighting for per-pixel accuracy
- Dot3 bump mapping
- Environmental bump mapping (EMBM)
- Procedural textures
- Per-pixel reflections
Integrated hardware transform engine
Integrated hardware lighting engine
- 8 lights per rendering pass
- Any combination of infinite, local, directional or spot
- Colored lights
DirectX® and S3TC® texture compression
Dual cube environment mapping capability
- Reflection maps
- Accurate, real-time environment reflections
Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
True, reflective bump mapping
- Z-correct bump mapping
- Phong-style lighting effects on bump maps with reflections
High-performance 2D rendering engine
- Optimized for 32-, 24-, 16-, 15- and 8bpp modes
- True-color hardware cursor with alpha
- Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad) for smooth animation
and video playback
High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
- High-definition video processor (HDVP) for full-screen,
full-frame video playback of HDTV and DVD content
- Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
- Hardware color-space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- Motion compensation
- 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering
- 8:1 up/down scaling
PERFORMANCE
- Per-pixel color keying
- Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering
- DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing
Bundled Software
- Incoming Forces : Full version
- E-Racer : 4 track version
Operating systems
- Windows XP
- Windows 2000
- Windows Me
- Windows NT® (all)
- Windows 98, Windows 95
- Linux Compatible
API support
- OpenGL® 1.3 and lower
- DirectX 8.1 and lower
COMPATIBILITY
- NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Fully-compliant professional OpenGL 1.3 support for all
Linux and Windows operating systems
- WHQL-certified for Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000,
- Windows NT, and Windows 98
Warranty
- 3-year limited warranty covering parts and labour
Page 2- Technology overview
