Creative confirms 3Dlabs-based board for consumers by the end of the year

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 29 May 2002 at 17:43

Creative Labs will use technology from 3Dlabs in a new graphics card aimed at the consumer market.

3Dlabs, recently acquired by Creative Labs, announced a new visual processing architecture earlier this month along with its first chip based on the technology codenamed the P10. While 3Dlabs will ship professional graphics cards using the P10 in Q3 this year, a source at 3Dlabs told us that 'Creative will also be using the architecture which was annouced this month to manufacture a consumer-based board' by the end of the year.

Creative Labs' Riccardo de Rinaldini, European Marcoms Manager, was more cagey about 3Dlabs technology in consumer card. 'We are still evaluating all the opportunities for bringing 3Dlabs-based products to the consumer space... it's a little too early to announce either product details or availability,' he said.

Creative Labs' acquisition of 3Dlabs, which makes professional graphics products for high-end workstations, puts it in a position to challenge nVIDIA's current stranglehold on the consumer graphics card market.

The continuing relationship between Creative Labs and nVIDIA is unclear, however. Mr Rinaldini said that 'Historically [Creative Labs] has often worked with many... suppliers at the same time, so the acquisition of 3Dlabs does not necessarily mean we will no longer work with other vendors.'

3Dlabs' P10 technology is designed to deliver more than 170Gigaflops and one TeraOp of programmable graphics performance together with a full 256-bit DDR memory interface for up to 20Gbytes/sec of memory bandwidth. In real terms this is described by 3Dlabs as bringing film-quality graphics and animation to the desktop.

For more information on 3Dlabs visit the Web site.