Installation and Drivers

The Creative Labs Annihilator was very easy to install; in fact the past five video boards I installed in my computer were easy to install. All I had to do was pop the video board in my AGP slot and load the drivers when prompted and I was ready to go.

The Creative Labs drivers support memory overclocking, but do not support core overclocking. Overclocking the core on a GeForce 256 yields very good results because the transform and lighting capabilities are increased and take a big burden off of the CPU.

The Creative Labs Annihilator drivers have the same options to tweak the board in graphics quality as the drivers straight from nVidia do. The software bundle is a little weak. I remember getting four full games with a graphics card, now I’m lucky if I get a few software demos.

The Creative Labs Annihilator comes shipped with a game called Evolva Scout. A game that I would never buy when it’s complete and shipped out to the market, but It’s good for the developers that the game comes shipped with the Creative Labs Annihilator because users can try a game out that they probably haven’t heard of before.

Other software demos include the very cool nVidia tech demos. The demos show off cubed environment mapping and the transform and lighting capabilities of the chip. I really like the Porsche Boxter model demo. It would be cool if that was converted into a screen saver format and rotated around.

Some good things I noticed when using the new GeForce 256 is that trilinear filtering has finally been implemented into the hardware. This is something that the TNT and TNT2 boards had to emulate. The trilinear filtering also doesn’t pose a performance drop like the emulation of trilinear filtering did for the TNT/TNT2. It makes the visuals on the screen more appealing; instead of seeing grainy marks, it is now smooth.

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