nV News - Creative Labs Annihilator Pro Review

MadOnion.com recently released their highly regarded Direct 3D benchmarking application known as 3DMark2000. In addition to benchmarking performance offered by recent CPU enhancements, support for hardware assisted transform and lighting was also added.

3DMark2000 offers a variety of graphics benchmarks including:

Game - Two simulated game tests each with low, medium, and high detail levels

Fill Rate - Measures fill rate using single and multi-texturing

Polygon - Measures number of triangles that can be rendered under different light sources

Texture Rendering - Measures frame rates based on texture sizes

Bump Mapping - Measures frame rates using hardware or software accelerated environmental bump mapping

A detailed description of each test can be found in the 3DMark2000 tests documentation.

As expected, the Annihilator Pro's use of DDR memory provides a significant advantage over the GeForce SDR in all tests except the Polygon, which is T&L intensive. Increases of over 50% are realized in the fill rate, texture rendering, and bump mapping benchmarks in 32-bit color.

In 32-bit color with the Annihilator Pro, 4 out of the 6 game tests show increased frame rates of over 25% compared to the GeForce SDR. This gave the Annihilator Pro an overall 3DMark score of 3,128 compared to the 2,536 of the GeForce SDR.

In 16-bit color, the GeForce SDR gets a 3DMark score of 3,412 compared to the Annihilator Pro's 3,619. Showing the results of 16 and 32-bit color on the same graph shows that the Annihilator Pro takes much less of a performance hit when moving from 16 to 32-bit color.

Benchmark Settings