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Game of the Year 2009

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Ease of Installation: 6 Features: 7 Performance: 8 Value: 8 Reviewer's Tilt: 8

Creative Labs bravely entered the 3-D game hardware market long before any of its competitors with the original 3D Blaster, a VESA local bus board based on a very early, low-end version of the 3Dlabs ASIC. Clearly attempting to keep the branding they established with their older product, Creative Labs has wisely chosen the Rendition chip for their first foray into the PCI-based game hardware market.

Why is the Rendition a wise choice? Because it's fast with 3-D, and it's cheap; what else could you want in a 3-D board? It comes with several games designed specifically for the Rendition, including Battle Arena Toshinden, Flight Unlimited, Rebel Moon, and a special Rendition-enhanced version of Quake. Almost without exception, all of these games looked good and played smoothly, even on a relatively pokey Pentium 100. Another game ported to the Rendition chip, Scorched Planet, also looked far better than either the DOS or Direct3D versions of this particular game.

As for its Direct3D acceleration capabilities, the 3D Blaster proved very solid compared to the other products in this roundup, and performed fairly closely to its Rendition-based siblings. For example, in the Tunnel and Twist tests from the Direct 3D Software Developers Kit, the 3D Blaster was about equal to Intergraph's Reactor but a bit behind Sierra On-Line's Screamin' 3D. Running the Direct3D test itself provided a slightly different comparative picture, as both its fill and polygon results were superior to the Reactor, and only slightly slower than the Screamin' 3D.

More important than raw scores, however, is how the board did with Direct3D titles. Microsoft's Monster Truck Madness played fairly smoothly with the highest possible settings on a Pentium 100 machine, except when several trucks came into view simultaneously. Using a Pentium 200 smoothed the play right out.

As for DOS and Windows performance, the Rendition chip is mediocre at best, and the 3D Blaster is no exception. In our DOS Quake demo, playing at only 320x200 resolution provided an acceptable frame rate (15 frames per second or faster) with a Pentium 100.

Even though the card natively supports DOS modes as high as 1280x1024, you wouldn't want to play Quake at any higher resolution with a machine of this speed. A Pentium 200 worked better, allowing for 15 fps Quake play at 640x480 resolution, but certainly not stellar performance. Windows performance pretty much fell in the same range: decent, but not great. The real Windows advantage is the presence of a faster RAMDAC, which allows for greater resolutions and higher refresh rates in comparison to its Rendition competitors.

All in all, the 3D Blaster is a very solid product. The inclusion of DirectX itself on the installation CD provides added convenience. The DOS and Windows performance is acceptable, and the price is right. Solid 3-D performance on slower Pentiums is really all you can ask for, and this board provides it.