The Features - Continued
The Creative Labs Annihilator Pro hardware-wise is just your basic DDR GeForce bundled with a few mediocre programs and utilities. Here is a list of what it came with:
- Manual
- Creative Drivers
- NVIDIA High IQ CD Sampler
- E-Colorific and 3Deep
- InterVideo WinDVD
- Evolva: Scout SE
- Need For Speed 4 (Full version)
- Dagoth Moor Zooligical Gardens (Technology Demo)
The software that the box shipped with, as you can see, isn't the most exciting bundle but that's not all you get. If you take a peek at what Creative is offering on their website, things change quiet a bit for the good. Browsing through the owners resources section of the Annihilator Pro section led me to a few utilities. I discovered the Creative Labs game launcher, overclocking utility, an AGP configuration utility and the ever intriguing Unified Driver (aka Glide wrapper). Each of these programs offered useful configuration abilities that should have come with the card, but at least something is available; period. The Game Launcher allows you to setup profiles for various games so that various D3D, OGL, Gamma or overclock settings are used when playing the game in question. The overclock utility is just what it sounds like but will hold settings in general (unlike the game launcher that does it per program). The AGP utility adds the ability to toggle things such as the AGP mode (1x, 2x, 4x), sideband addressing, AGP aperture size and the infamous "fast writes" option. The Unified Driver has been available from Creative for time now. This driver allows NVIDIA based cards (TNT, TNT2, GeForce) to run Glide based titles (albeit at a performance hit). The hardware might be average but the utilities Creative provides on their website is big plus in my book.
