Creative's Ultra

Creative held off on announcing a TNT2 product back at GDC, claiming they were holding off to get a better determination of chip yields from Nvidia. It looks like they found the information they need, and have recently announced the 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra.

You'll find many of the standard specs here. RivaTNT2 Ultra, 32MB SDRAM with -5 and -5.5ns memory, integrated 300MHz RAMDAC, cooling fan, etc. The core and memory speeds are set at the "vendor-recommended" 150MHz and 183MHz, respectively. This won't be the limit of what the card will be able to do however, as Creative will be actively encouraging the art of overclocking!

Overclocking the 3Dblaster

A separate utility will be provided with the 3D Blaster, specifically to aid power users with overclocking their cards ("it won't be hidden in 3 levels of menus"). The utility will allow users to set their desired overclocking configuration, and then run normally for 5 minutes to test the stability of the setting.

At the end of 5 minutes, if everything went fine, the program will ask you to hit a button to save the setting, and possibly try a higher one. If the system crashes or hangs before 5 minutes is up, the setting will not have been saved, and upon reboot, the last saved setting will be used instead.

Possible upgrades

Taking a cue from their Live!Ware program, Creative is also working on a small application that will allow users to customize their core/memory and configuration settings on a per-game basis. An especially taxing program like Q3A may be too much for an overclock of 175/200, but a slightly simpler game like Motorhead may allow such speeds. Creative wants to make it easy (or seamless) to customize the performance and stability of the card based on the specific application, and this may find its way out to TNT2 Ultra owners by way of downloadable upgrade.

Pricing

The 3D Blaster Ultra TNT2 will be priced at US$229.99, $20 less than the equivalent TNT2 Ultra offering from Diamond. A standard TNT2 at 125MHz/150MHz will also be offered, without the advanced overclocking features, for a speculated $179.99, but this hasn't been confirmed by Creative.