Written: 2/21/2000
Written by: Moto
Price: $275
Manufactured by:
Creative Labs
The Creative Annihilator Pro is the fastest video card The Tech Zone has ever tested. Powered by nVidia's GeForce 256 chipset and 32 megs of DDR RAM, the Annihilator Pro can run any 3D games are blazing speed. The Annihilator Pro is a game card, pure and simple. There are no fancy TV out or video in. All you get for your $275 is a video card and a fairly good software bundle.
Creative makes two Annihilator video cards, one Pro version and one normal version. The only difference between the two cards is the use of DDR RAM in the Pro. DDR stands for Double Data Rate. In theory DDR memory offer twice the peak memory bandwidth over Single Data Rate memory which is used on the normal Annihilator. To find out more about the DDR memory you can check out nVidia's DDR Memory Technical Briefing.
The Annihilator Pro uses the GeForce 256 chipset, which is the world's first GPU or Graphics Processing Unit. The GPU functions as a specialized processor made to accelerate transform and lighting calculations. While a PC CPU can do these calculations, its performance is no where near as fast as the GPU. nVidia claims the GPU can do certain calculations 2 to 4 times faster than today's fastest CPU's.
The main advantage of the GPU is that it takes the work load off the CPU. Before nVidia released the GeForce 256 chip, transform and lighting calculations were all done by the CPU. Now these calculation can be offloaded to the GPU. Because the GPU is doing more of the work, you may not need the latest and fastest CPU to get the most out of the card. Our testing somewhat confirmed this as we found our Quake 3 benchmarks were the same whether we use a Celeron running at 600Mhz or an Athlon running at 850Mhz.
The software bundle that comes with the Annihilator Pro is fairly good. However I have lost count of how many copies of Need For Speed IV and Win DVD I have now. Creative did toss in a copy of Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens demo just to be different. The inclusion of the nVidia tech demos are nice too. Those demos really do a nice job of showing what the Annihilator Pro is capable of.
With DDR RAM running at nearly twice the speed as the SDR Annihilator, the Pro should have no problems running all your games in 32 bit color. While you can do this with the SDR card, you do take a big hit in frame rate. In testing of SDR GeForce cards, we've notice a drop of up to 30% going from 16 bit to 32 bit color. This kind of drop shouldn't happen in the DDR card.
With a street price of $275, the Annihilator Pro is not a cheap card. For that price, you don't get any extras like TV out or video in. What you do get is a video card that runs your 3D games faster than any other non GeForce card out there. Is that enough? Let's find out.