Creative Labs : 3D Blaster Savage4 Review

Installation

Installation, as with almost all of Creative products is a breeze. I removed my Savage3D from my AGP slot and with a bit of pressure easily inserted the 3D Blaster in. After fixing all the cables and rebooting, I was greeted with the Add New Hardware wizard. Then I proceeded to install the drivers.

Installation of the drivers was just as simple, just insert the driver CD and it prompts you for the installation directory. It installs 3Deep and Colorific as well. 3Deep is a utility that allows the user to change the Gamma level within a game without actually altering the windows desktop gamma level. Colorific is a screen to print colour-matching tool that allows you to set your monitors setting to match as closely as possible the same colours of they were to be printed.

The 3dblaster comes with its own utility called Blaster Control, which lets you set the refresh rates, colour depth and gives you card and driver information. It also lets you overclock! Initially the slider allowed you to set both the memory and the core at anything up to 143Mhz, but with the second driver that too was limited. This is acceptable since excess overclocking can cause some problems and if you were really serious about overclocking you would use another tool like Powerstrip. Blaster control is a very good piece of software and compares very well others in its kind.

Drivers & stability

The drivers that arrived with the card on the CD were atrocious; I doubt any current-generation game D3D or OpenGL would've worked properly on it. That said the next driver release fixed most of those issues but still left a few problems here and there (Note that along with stabilty came along visual glitches and a dip in the frame rate). Creative's drivers still haven't reached the level of S3's current reference drivers which also leave a lot to be desired. The difference is a lot more obvious when higher resolutions are in use.

Creative have also limited the overclocking range on the Blastercontrol in the latest driver update. The limitation is now at 125/143, which is more or less a PRO+ which is a good thing. As far as i can see anything other than a 0.88 ratio between core/mem will not bring you a linear increase in fillrate which makes setting like 150/133 more or less pointless. And as i dont see the memory going anywhere near 175Mhz this limitation doesnt make much of a difference.

Of course it has been proved beyond doubt that creative have very good driver support as is being shown by the on-going development of the 3D Blaster Voodoo2 where they've developed a hack which allows them to play with 512x512 textures. And with the 3D Blaster Savage4 to have unified driver support very soon, a whole host of new games will be playable as they were meant to be, like Blizzard's upcoming sequel Diablo 2 which will have lots of special effects enabled in only Glide mode.

Next page: Image Qaulity & Overclocking