Creative Labs also made a decent graphics card based on the nVidia Riva TNT chipset last year. But that’s just it, it was a “decent” card, not exactly the cream of the crop, though it did have a fairly low retail price. Now, in 1999, Creative Labs have just released the Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra. 
 

The card’s graphics controller and memory is clocked at the default speeds of 150MHz and 183MHz.  So it would seem that Creative Labs -just like many other manufacturers- have opted to build at the safe speeds. Offering a TV-out based on the popular Brooktree 869 controller and 32MB of 5.5ns EliteMT SDRAM, the card’s price makes it one of the cheapest Ultra TNT2 cards. Though it has a list price of $229, you’re sure to find this card at around $190 - $200.

However, the software bundle provided with the unit is a mess. To start with, a game bundle is only shipped with the European versions, while the American and the Asian units are shipped without any games at all -just a SoftMPEG player for the MPEG1 Video CD fans. Well, I suppose you can’t complain much, given the price of this package. Next, for the drivers and utilities of the package. After a quick software installation, your display properties are upgraded with the display options for the Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra, providing some tweaking options for Direct3D and OpenGL, not to mention a slider for overclocking the card. At 175/200MHz the card is about 95% stable and at the maximum of 183/210MHz, stability is around 85%. This is mostly because of the cooling unit shipped with the card, which is incidentally the same cooling unit as that on the Diamond Viper V770. It’s OK as cooling units go and it gets the job done -but exceeding 175/200 is not easy. But what’s important is that this card is fairly stable at 175/200MHz, not bad -for $200- to have a card clocked at this setting. 
 

Overall, the drivers are pretty good, though I did notice some problems with Kingpin at 1024x768 at 32-bit color. But since the driver build is still in beta, these occasional glitches are to be expected. So Creative better work fast and hard to release a final driver for the 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra. TV-out on the board allows the user to use the TV and the monitor simultaneously. However, the picture quality of the TV-out is not all that great… but it’s OK, mostly at 640x480. Now I’d like to talk a bit about Creative’s unified driver for their 3D Blaster Riva TNT and the 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 series. This driver is to offer support for Glide, 3dfx's proprietary API. As would be expected, 3dfx went ballistic over this but Creative is still holding on to it.

Since Glide games are optimized for 3dfx Voodoo cards, don’t expect the Creative cards to work just as good as Voodoos, because (quite simply) they don’t. In any case, apart from Starsiege: Tribes, Wing Commander: Prophecy and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, the rest of the Glide games are nothing to write home about. The framerates are downright slow and some games have problems with visuals. So this driver is basically useful for a handful of games, but you should think of it as an extra feature. I don’t consider this feature in itself as something that would put the 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra at the top of my shopping list. As I said, this is an extra free feature that users present and future will welcome.

Lastly, a word about the performance of this board. 3D performance is slightly above average compared to the typical Ultra TNT2 board clocked at 150/183MHz. DVD playback was very sm6ooth with good image quality. All in all, this board performs very well.