Creative 3D Blaster Savage4

Many people put down this cards performance, but there are very few cards in it's price range that can out perform it, also bearing in mind that this chipset is over two and a half years old. I work to a very strict budget for computer equipment (wife and five kids, spare any change guv') so when i needed to replace my no-name 4Mb AGP card, it was a tough choice. I had set myself a budget of £100 at the time which restricted me to mainly lower end versions (limited memory) of some 3DfX cards. Luckily though, i happened across the Savage 4 in a sale at Dixons for £49.99 for the x2 AGP version ... more

This card has taken a bit of stick along with its chipset, S3's Savage 4 but this is actually a very solid performing card particularly for its age and if you can find one will make the ideal replacement for that Voodoo 2 or Banshee with significant performance gains over these cards. Although the Creative version had dissappointing clock speeds at 110 MHz on the GPU in comparison with 125 MHz on Diamonds Stealth III also based on the Savage 4 chipset, this is a card worth considering if you have an older machine. A friend of mine (Whiplash - Go and check his article out on the card) had one ... more

I had a Creative Savage 4 a while back now when I was playing games such as Quake 2. I was also playing Half-life and games such as these ran very well on my old K6-2 450Mhz machine. I had one little problem with it though, that was the drivers, they were pretty poor to say the least, it took ages to install them and even then they had problems with games such as Unreal in the cards later stages. As I say about Unreal it wasnt just the graphics, the card its self was not up to much really, The graphics card just simply did not pull its own wieght on this type of game. Fps was pretty poor and ... more

I bought this graphics card a few weeks ago,from Dixons,in a clearance sale for £30.Having a rather old and cranky pc,I thought this might make a good difference to the performance. Having an old motherboard without an AGP slot designed for the newer boards,I had to resort to the PCI slot solution.I was immediately impressed by the 32 MB of memory on board and what a difference it has made to my general windows and game experience.It also has a 300mhz savage processor (hence the name) This card can be tweaked in various ways;the software includes a program that allows the colours on your ... more

This card blew me away for all that it cost. The model I have is made by Creative Labs and costs only about £65 these days. Not bad to start with for a 32MB graphics card. My usualy test for these things is Unreal but it doesn't come with Direct-3D support as standard so I went hunting for an upgrade. I got it and also noticed that the upgrade had support for METAL inbuilt. I checked this out a little and found out that it's the proprietary 3D engine that the S3 cards use. Pleasant. Until I found that it simply wouldn't run. It kept crashing my machine. So I gave up on the METAL side of things ... more