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.

Benchmarks :

We've recently updated the test rig which explains the lack of a comparison here, but I doubt system performance is far away from that used for the Radeon 8500 Review. We may have lost a few points from the switch to XP from 98SE, but we also probably regained those points in the switch from Athlon 1.4 to XP1800+. Here's the setup :

Motherboard : Epox 8KHA+ using Turbo system timings (not overclocked for this test)
Memory : 256MB Kingmax PC2100 DDR SDRAM
HDD : 40GB ATA-100 5400rpm (FAT32)
CPU : AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Sound : Creative Labs Audigy
Graphics : Creative Labs 3D Blaster GeForce3 Ti500
Driver : Detonator 21.85

If you're puzzled about my using the 21.85 detonators and not the current 23.11s, it's simply that the 21.85s are proven performers and seem universally well suited. I'll give the 23.11s a little longer to show their stuff before using them for benchmarking.

3DMark 2001 :

The Ti500 blasted its way through the full set of tests under 3DMark2001. You may notice that these results seem lower than you might expect from the Radeon 8500 but personally I don't think there's a helluva lot between them. It was great to see the Nature test running at full tilt, though this unfortunately doesn't count towards the final score. I should also point out that the instances of banding that were visible on the Radeon during the horizontal scrolling parts of the lobby test were absent here. I have some doubts about the effectiveness of the T&L engine, which I believe is now handled by the vertex shader rather than being fed through the hardwired T&L unit, but there may be a few more optimisations yet to come for this. It'd be interesting to see results with T&L fed through the vertex shader and then compare them to those fed through the T&L unit.

VulpineGL :

This demanding OpenGL benchmark is one we've only just added to our suite of tests. This rolling benchmark is a visual tour-de-force with rolling pans across ultra-high polygon landscapes and water effects. Add a good looking girl and high indoor scenario and this has it all.

Rather than list all the settings, a picture speaks a thousand words, and if you're wondering why I left music and sound enabled, well, you have music and sound in games don't ya? Just for the purists I also ran the benchmark with sound disabled. I gained 0.1fps.

And of course the results :

 

If you're wondering why I used the "Standard OpenGL 1.2" setting and not the GeForce 3 specific settings, this is so we don't give NVIDIA and unfair advantages or disadvantages in future comparisons with cards that may not feature the GF3 GPU.

The demo ran through flawlessly. For the record, my Radeon64 DDR VIVO suffers from some nasty flashing textures on the outdoor scenes in this demo, fortunately the Ti handled it with a bit more finesse. An average of 65.1fps may sound low, but this is actually a damned good score.

Page 8- Performance Continued