I just got back from Creative Labs Nordics office in
Hillröd, Denmark. Where I was shown the pre-release versions of Creatives next releases
in their 3D Blaster series that has previously featured products like the old Verité 3D
Blaster PCI and the Voodoo2 based 3D Blaster Voodoo2.
3D Blaster TNT2:
The Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 will be launched late march/early April (CeBit?) 99 as
Creatives new highend card for power gamers. It will be release in one version featuring
32MegaBytes of onboard SDRAM, AGP4x support, a 300Mhz RAMDAC and both Video-Out and a Flat
Panel Display connector. Creative pointed out that the issue in PC graphics in 1999 is
going to be Image Quality and not raw fillrate and speed as it has previously been, and
after seeing Unreal levels with over 200Mb’s of 2048*2048 textures in 32Bit color I
can do nothing more than agree.
What we saw of the TNT2:
Creative started out by showing us a computer running a couple of demos and Quake2 on a
alpha silicon TNT2 with beta drivers, it was also running at less then 125Mhz core
clockspeed on a PentiumII 450 with 192Mb’s of RAM.
At first Jan Ström at CL Nordic launched Quake2 and wich ran pretty fluid and my
immediate response to this was "Oh yeah, I’ve seen Quake2 before, what’s
new?" but then he asked us what resolution we thought it was running at. That’s
when I took a look at the HUD (the health-meter), I hadn’t noticed it before because
it was too small, it was running at 1600*1200 in 32Bit color and it was fully playable!
