Overclocked Benchmark Scores

While overclocking the card gave big improvements in Quake 2 and 3D Mark 2000, they didn't do much for Quake 3. However the speed difference between 16 bit and 32 bit is not as great as in a SDR card. I ran the Quake 3 demo again using the setup I play with. The only change is I ran three passes at 16 bit color, then three at 32 bit color.

Resolution: 1024 X 768
Graphic mode: CUSTOM
GL Driver: DEFAULT
GL extensions: ON
Full screen: ON
Lighting: LIGHTMAP
Geometric detail: HIGH
Texture detail: HIGH
Texture quality: 32 BIT
Texture Filter: BILINEAR

The game options are:

Marks on walls: NO
Ejecting brass:  NO
Dynamic lighting: NO
Identify target: YES
High quality sky: YES

Overclocked Benchmark Scores

If you have a look at my review of the Asus V6600 Pure, you will notice that the 16 bit performance is nearly the same as the DDR Annihilator. However step the color depth up to 32 bit and the Annihilator takes over, posting 20fps faster than the SDR Asus. Clearly 32 bit gaming is where the Annihilator Pro performs best. The frame count doesn't drop that much and I doubt anyone would say 78.5fps at 1024x768x32 bit Quake 3 is slow.

For the person who just want speed and great visual quality without any fancy TV out, video in, 3D glasses or any of that other stuff, the Creative Annihilator Pro is as good as it gets. My only concern with the card was it didn't work on Quake 3 using my Athlon system. For the 15 or so minutes that it does work I was able to run a few Quake 3 timedemos. With the Athlon running at 850Mhz, the scores were no better than the Celeron at 605Mhz. There could be three reasons for this. One, the GPU is doing most of the work leaving the CPU with not much to do. Two, the card has reaches its limit at the 600Mhz level and doesn't go any faster no matter how much faster the CPU is. Three, and most likely the real reason, the Annihilator Pro is not working correctly with the Athlon system. Both Creative, AMD and Asus are aware of this problem and is working on a fix.

If you have a Pentium or Celeron system, I can highly recommend the Creative Annihilator Pro. It's simply the fastest video card I've ever tested. For Athlon owners, you may want to wait till Creative works out all the kinks. At a street price of $275, it's one of the more expensive video cards on the market but the fastest is never cheap.

The Goods

• Really really fast

• It's a GeForce card

• Very overclockable

• Super 32 bit performance

• Good looking box

The Bads

• Had problems playing Quake 3 on an Athlon system

• Expensive

Our Rating: 9/10