Creative Labs 3d Blaster GeForce3 Ti500

Author : Wayne Date : 24th September 2001

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.

DVD Quality :

One thing I really must bitch about is the fact that Creative don't bundle a DVD player with this card. Considering the cost, the fact that the GeForce3 GPU offers hardware acceleration, and the most annoying of all, the fact that this card ships with TV out, I would have the thought that bundling a DVD player was pretty inevitable. Fortunately I whipped out my copy of PowerDVD but not everybody will be in this fortunate position.

Firing up PowerDVD I slotted in my reference DVD, that power packed action thriller, George of the Jungle. Okay, so it won't do my street cred much good, but this Disney classic does feature lots of contrasty scenes, low light scenes and a good quality image.

My initial impression is that DVD playback isn't quite as crisp as on the Radeons, but to be fair to it the quality is much better than I remember and though it can't quite match the ATi cards it's not far away and is certainly as good as any hardware DVD decoder card I've ever used. There's no major signs of picture jitter or combing (feathered edges) and I think most people will be more than happy with the quality.

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Conclusions :

Creative labs have developed an enviable reputation for quality and value for money over their long and illustrious reign as one of the biggest names in the PC multimedia market. The 3D Blaster Titanium 500 is a welcome addition to their range boasting impressive performance levels and a software bundle that will keep you happy without bogging you down in games you didn't want to begin with. My only concern is availability, certainly in the UK it was hard to track down one of these cards from anyone other than Creative themselves. UPDATE : Creative tell me that they are confident their etailers either carry stock or are a couple of days in the ordering. The problem wasn't that I couldn't find an etailer with stock, it was that I couldn't find an etailer that carried the card at all, although in fairness I did only try my 4 usual sources. The moral here is have a good look around the usual sorces if you want to track down one of these excellent boards. As I mentioned earlier, Jungle are just one stcokist who carry the card at a price of £289.99 inclusive of VAT.

With regards image quality I guess I'll have to swallow hard and fess up. I switched to the Radeon 64 because it offered superior image quality to the Geforce2 GTS, though the GTS remained in my personal rig for its pure gaming prowess. I have looked long and hard at the Ti500s image quality, in slow motion, while paused and standing on my head. I've examined uncompressed screen captures and enlarged portions of high detail in Photoshop and here's my conclusion. The GeForce 3 Titanium is the equal of Radeon's image quality, and in terms of its far more accurate filtering techniques it often actually looks BETTER! There, I've said it! I have to be straight and confess that NVIDIA's image quality has come an awful long way since the days of the GeForce and GeForce2 and that I got far more than I was bargaining for when I took a close look.

One thing I did notice is that ATi use far more vibrant colours while the GF3's colours tend to be more natural and muted. This immediately creates the illusion that the ATi card is banging out a much higher quality image than the GF3, but in the examples I examined in depth there was little or no difference between them, other than the GF3 seeming to handle MIP maps and filtering in a much more pleasing way.

The Radeon 8500, which is still an excellent card, came very close to picking up our power buyer award but missed out because of its poor drivers at the time of testing. The Creative 3DBlaster GeForce3 Titanium exhibited no such weaknesses, and though its price may seem high if you convert it to dollars, it's actually a very good price for the UK market, particularly for a card with such big name branding and a 3 year warranty. It isn't the world's greatest overclocker, but for faster RAM you pay bigger price tags and I think this is a nice combination of speed, price and flexibility.

The question I suppose most of you are asking is should you buy this or a Radeon 8500? I'd look at it this way, if you want an instantly rewarding experience right out of the box, if solid drivers, a mature technology and a gaming proven product are more important than features like TRUFORM, and if you have the extra money you'll need to pull it off then buy this card. That doesn't mean I don't admire the 8500. My fondness for ATi products is well documented, but in the harsh reality that drives today's hardware choices the GeForce Ti 500 is simply a more robust product at the moment. The fact that it now equals or surpasses the image quality that was once the domain of ATi merely goes to strengthen that decision. ATi are innovators, they have added features to the 8500 that is used and used properly stand to make it a peerless card, but I wouldn't want to spend money on promises. The GeForce3 Ti is an honest card, by that I mean there's no mystery in its feature set or its implementation of those features. It may not do it all, but what it does it does well and sometimes that's what really counts.

My only bitch is the lack of a bundled DVD Player, and though I'm deducting points for its less than stellar overclocking, I'm going easy here as it's not part of the product's brief that it will run at insane clocks. What matters is that it runs at spec, the fact it runs beyond has to be seen as a bonus.

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