LGR - Creative 3D Blaster VLB

Can you tell me the name of the music you used at the start of this video? It's from Epidemic Sound but what is the name of the track?

Jason Maltz

There’s a lot of PC goodness that’s Creative specific. Could easily have a machine with Sound/MPEG/3D and the CDROM all being from them!

JennaKay

Indeed, they released all kinds of fascinating products in the mid 90s! Another one I hope to cover is the Creative Video Blaster, which was a 16-bit ISA video capture card for viewing live TV and recording footage in Windows 3.1

LGR

This is a great video, and I love to hear about Creative's journey through the sound and graphics market in the 90's. I have a "small" collection of Creative video and sound cards and I just find it so fascinating that a company so renowned for their sound cards ventured into the video/3D graphics space.

Josh Hooper

I believe it! Even an 486DX4-100 OverDrive can pull some tolerable frames on Quake when matched with other decent hardware. I gotta track down one of those PR75s someday, I think Vetz who I mentioned in the video was running his 3D Blaster VLB with one of those.

LGR

No kidding, haha. PC gaming rags were so terrible for so very long. If it's not the awful writing and bad jokes, it's all the absurd advertising that tried every gimmick under the sun to stand out.

LGR

At least with RTX you're getting fantastic performance normally and it's only when you apply graphical effects that it tanks. With the 3D Blaster you don't even get any additional effects, it's just always bad! :D

LGR

A good comparison! One of those transitory devices that's probably better to read about than to actually use, and honestly belongs in a museum at this point.

LGR

A P120 would be ideal for this card. If only I could find a VLB motherboard to pair with it, argh! Yeah I'm glad I waited until 1998 to grab my first 3D accelerator and went with 3dfx. Glide mode may have only been a footnote of an API in the end, but at least it was extremely well-supported while it lasted and had some half-decent OpenGL and DirectX support.

LGR

I don't think so? Maybe one of the later Verite cards but I'm not sure, I'll have to check. I'd really like to test the original 1000 though.

LGR

I didn't want to believe the review but they really got it spot-on to my experience... Now to track down one of the PCI versions. I'd love to pair this was a Pentium II or III and let all those sharply-rendered polygons go wild!

LGR

There is a slight difference between what's seen recording a CRT with a camera versus capturing the VGA feed directly, yes. They're both 60fps video files but the effect is a bit different due to the frame blending and visual persistence that happens when pointing a camera at a screen, something not seen when capturing frames straight to a video file. However, the gameplay is exactly the same underneath and what you see in the direct capture is closest to reality :)

LGR

Ah, yeah, the age of the 3D decelerators as c't by Heise Verlag called them fittingly back then. Regarding the 3D software performance, my system in 96 was an Am5x86-PR75 running at 160 MHz, i could play anything i wanted. Even Quake ran at something you would have considered playable back then.

BastetFurry

Is it me or does the direct capture look to have a lower frame rate than the screen recording?

Jorg Rademaker

I'm watching it now, and that PC Zone article at 2:30 about video card performance was really ahead of its time in terms of testing and benchmarking. But, holy CRAP is the writing cringe-worthy! I thought that PC Accelerator was more than "edgy" enough, but whoever wrote (and approved) that PC Zone piece was definitely not helping make gaming less insular at the time! :P

Bryan McIntosh

Ah, like buying a modern RTX3070, and it's RTX features is only supported in a few games, and with RTX on ya get less frame rate than without... haha, good thing we are way past such things happening... haha...

TBthegr81

I was actually surprised it does as much 2D as it does. Windows acceleration is quite a bit more than Voodoo 1/2 ever did, so that's maybe a neat little feather in its cap. Seeing the earliest 3D accelerators like this running is a lot like watching an old Stanley Steamer car, chugging along at 30 MPH and then eventually catching on fire. It's such a nascent time that its mere existence was a novelty, while its practicality was almost a secondary thought.

Nathan (PixelPipes)

I'm kinda impressed that Creative Labs managed to create something that at the same time both innovative and outdated. If only the card wasn't tied to old CPUs.

Vladimir Vyun

Yikes... I've seen better performance in some of those games in software mode on my P120 compy, even at the same higher resolutions, Magic Carpet being a good example since it supports high-res in software mode. (It's not immediately obvious how to engage it, but it's there!) I'm actually kinda glad I missed out on a lot of late 90s PC gaming because the market was just an API free-for-all for the most part; it was so much safer to buy games on consoles and KNOW that they were going to work. :P

Kris Asick

Speaking of Rendition cards... do you have any? If not, I might be able to hook you up with one.

RetroSwim

Did Fatal Racing use a Daft Punk song (midi-ified) as their intro music? I swear thats a DP song.

Justin Urhead

A graphics accelerator that doesn't accelerate. Yeah I can see why this didn't sell well and that review didn't lie. Still fascinating attempt though, just really held back by it using the VLB standard.

Alyxx the Rat

Oof, I haven't looked them up soooo I can only imagine

LGR

I'll take your word for it! I can barely stand to watch a few minutes of my old work, heh

LGR

It's not doing anything! No color keying or the like, the 2D card just sits there idling in the background :)

LGR

I'm just curious, when the 3D card is doing it's thing, is the 2D card doing anything at all? I assume not, and this card is either acting as a pass through or taking over all video output, and not doing the whole keyframe thing some tuner cards did.

Scott Seligman

Hey now, that Diamond Edge 3D video is still a good one!

Robert Launder

I had previously only heard of 3Dlabs via that old carmack plan file where he reviews the 3D accelerator devices of the day (in 1996!). Interesting stuff! As an aside; it’s a pretty scary google if you look up the people behind that Rebel Moon game 😬

Ah, that's one that I've still never used. Not for its 3D at least. Only way I've used one of mine is while paired with a 3dfx Voodoo just using for 2D passthrough!

LGR

Heh, yeah that's about it! The lack of real filtering really is fascinating to experience in person, especially when being so used to it in Glide mode. Makes everything feel more like a high-res PS1 or Saturn game.

LGR

Still better than an S3 Virge.

Frederick G.

So it's like software rendering... if the software were on a VLB card and only up to 4x faster. Also, this is what 3D acceleration was like before "bilinear texture mapping" was a thing to smooth out those textures. EDIT: Bwahahah, actually there wasn't "bilinear texture mapping", but sometimes there was a cheap attempt to smooth textures by dither-blending. Thanks for reminding me :)

Seriously, CD-ROMs were mind-boggling to me at the time. Seeing textured 3D games that looked this sharp would've been unthinkable! And yeah that one bit is staying in, I want people to know my pain :P

LGR

Excellent dinner-viewing, and god, it's nuts to think back being in like...elementary school around that time, barely cognizant of what a computer even was while tech shit was just going wild. There's just something super fascinating about this barely-there stuff, like all the different storage mediums just a few years later. All that said, I do hope the distressed bit over how much footage you'd built up makes the final cut, that got a good laugh. :D

Valora Inverse

Indeed, they dropped the product like a hot, rotten potato. I'll be truly surprised if one of those modules surfaces, but I'd love to see it.

LGR

I found a 1996 usenet post where one person claimed to have acquired the memory upgrade and successfully tried the beta directx drivers. But yeah that upgrade seems to just about not exist. I guess Creative quickly realized that card was never going anywhere and stopped putting resources into it as quickly as they could.

Lennart Sorensen

May it prove to be some relaxing wind-down viewing 😊

LGR

First video I’ll play once my three rugrats are asleep. :)

Joon Choi

YOU'RE WINNER

LGR

OMG youtube said NO views?! was I first?! amazing, awesome video for it too, I love your GPU videos, Clint! Takes me back to childhood! Thank you for all you do!

gitshiver