Retro Review: nVidia Geforce 256 DDR Part 2
2nd March 2025
In Part 1 of this retro review, we explored the Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro, an nVidia Geforce 256-based card with DDR SGRAM memory. In this Part 2, we'll get the card installed and begin testing.
Given that I tend to focus the DOS Days website on the DOS era (no kidding), this card is pretty late where in late 1999 we'd all moved to Windows for gaming. As such, finding suitable hardware to test this card proved to be more of a challenge than I'm used to.
Here's the card again:
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro, model CT6970 (1999)
The GeForce 256 was designed to run on the then-new AGP 4x bus, its support arriving with the introduction of the Intel i820 and VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipsets. In the DOS Days motherboard collection, I don't have anything with this chipset - in fact, the only AGP 4x boards I have are Socket A/Socket 462 (2002) and beyond, and I want to keep this as period-correct as possible.
The best I found was a couple of Slot 1 Intel 440BX "Seattle" chipset-based boards which give us an AGP 2x bus. One is the ABit AB-BH6 and the other a Gigabyte GA-686BX which I reviewed way back in September 2021. The A-Bit board was chosen for initial testing since it already had a Pentium II-233 Klamath and 128 MB of SDRAM installed. The other reason for choosing this over the Gigabyte is that strangely, you'll notice in the picture above the Annihilator Pro card I received has a 3-pin fan wire and the card's onboard fan header is only 2-pin. The A-Bit motherboard provides a spare 3-pin fan header designed for a case fan, so I made use of that for the card.
Power Up!
A good sign - the card works!
Windows Driver Installation
I decided to go with the Creative Labs driver CD installation (version 4.12.01.0353), so reverted my Windows 98 video card setup back to the standard 640 x 480 in 16 colours, and then ran SETUP from the CD-ROM:
Once the PC has restarted, we have a new program group called 'Creative':
The main SETUP program didn't automatically run the DirectX 7.0 setup, so I did that before continuing which upgraded my existing DX5 installation.
The Creative drivers come with the excellent 'BlasterControl' utility that runs as a tooltip, and offers up almost every setting you would need:
This is handy for quickly tweaking resolution and colour depths, but going into BlasterControl Properties is where the more detailed configuration is:
Performance Testing
For the initial round of performance tests, I ran 3DMark '99, 3DMark 2000 (which identifies and runs Direct3D Hardware T&L), and Final Reality. Again, bear in mind this is running in AGP 2x with a PII-233 (two and a half years older than the graphics card), so it will be somewhat restricted.
The actual tests ran pretty smoothly though - I've seen the sky fail to render correctly in this demo before with some other cards, but here it looks good
Now for 3DMark 2000:
Again, the actual tests ran smooth for the most part, and rendered everything correctly - some accelerators I've tested fail to apply a texture to ground objects in this demo
and Final Reality...
So in summary, how did the GeForce 256 DDR do on a venerable Pentium II-233 via AGP 2x?
| Test | 3DMark '99 (3DMarks/CPU Marks) | 3DMark 2000 (3DMarks/CPU Marks) |
|---|---|---|
| 800 x 600 x 16-bit, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple frame buffer | 2170 / 2345, 20-23 fps | 2286 / 151, 13-39 fps |
| 800 x 600 x 32-bit, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple frame buffer | 2138 / 2335, 20-23 fps | 2292 / -, 13-39 fps |
| 1024 x 768 x 16-bit, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple frame buffer | 2140 / 2346, 20-23 fps | 2271 / 150, 13-39 fps |
| 1024 x 768 x 32-bit, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple frame buffer | 2030 / 2344, 20-23 fps | 2212 / -, 13-39 fps |
| 1280 x 1024x 16-bit, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple frame buffer | 2019 / 2341, 20-23 fps | 2157 / 152, 13-39 fps |
| 1280 x 1024 x 32-bit, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple frame buffer | 1718 / 2344, 20-23 fps | 1845 / -, 13-39 fps |
All the above tests ran without issue, time and time again. No untextured polygons, no artifacting or system hangs, so I'm pleased we appear to have a solid, reliable card here. It's pretty obvious the rest of the system (CPU / memory / bus) is holding the card back, so in Part 3 I'll switch out the CPU for a Pentium III Coppermine, which launched at the same time as the GeForce 256 SDR, so is very period-correct.