Creative Labs : 3D Blaster Savage4 Review

Overclockability

The savage4 PRO chips which are in use in the 3dblaster are certified only for 110Mhz. So far only Diamond and Elsa are releasing PRO+ based products, which means that in all likelihood some of those extra PRO+'s might've been sold as PRO's as well. It's true the percentage must be low but the chance is still there; just remember it's more or less down to luck.

Luck was definitely on my side though, as I managed to take my 3D Blaster's core speed up to a staggering 155Mhz! (From 110Mhz!) Sadly the memory on my card seemed to be an exact 8ns SDRAM spec part, which meant that I couldn't take the memory more than 135Mhz without seeing visual artifacts. When I ran the card at 155 there was no problem with stability at all. The second 3D Blaster that I tested had much better memory, which could be taken to 150, the problem now was the core which refused to function at anything higher than 143!...Still at least I could get 143/143 without much of a problem.

In some of my benchmarking I noticed that in order to get a proper linear in fillrate in proportion to the core speed, the core speed must be 0.88 of the memory clock which is how both diamond and creative have designed their specs (Creative 3DB 110/125=0.88 and Diamond Stealth 125/143=0.88). That said if I were to set my core speed to 155, in order to get maximum fillrate I would need my memory to be 175Mhz! Which would be equal to the lower spec TNT2's. I am surprised that nobody has decided to attempt making such a product because it would definitely sell as it will make games very playable at 1024x768 (not that it is not playable now, but anything under 50fps just doesn't seem fluid anymore).

Image Quality

Looking at the 2D image quality at the higher resolutions, the 3d blaster has the 2d image quality of what you would probably expect from current generation graphic cards. It isn't outstanding but it's not mug either. I haven't been able to try 1600x1200 since I do not have a monitor capable of doing so. The 3D image quality is definitely something else though, as you will see from the screenshots below the 3DBlaster screenshots look MUCH better than the reference shots taken by 3Dmark. (Note that these pictures are over 1 megs each)

The 3Dmark reference shots are taken with the Direct3D software rendered, which means it should be an accurate reflection of what the frame should look like. It is probably true to say that the Savage4 doesn't render the most accurate reflection of what the frame should look like, but if it looks better that is more than enough for me.

Next page: Benchmarks