Creative Technology announced the expansion of its 2D/3D graphics accelerator lineup with the upcoming Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT card.

　　Based on nVidia's latest in its line of RIVA video processors, the RIVA TNT, the new board from Creative will be built for both AGP 2.X and PCI configurations. It boasts 16MB of SDRAM.

　　"We have significantly enhanced our lineup of 2D/3D graphics cards with the addition of the RIVA TNT chipset to Creative's arsenal of Graphics Blaster products," said Hock Leow, vice president of Creative's multimedia division, in a statement. "With the combination of 2D and 3D performance and quality of the Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT and the outstanding 3D performance of our acclaimed 3D Blaster Voodoo2, Creative delivers the fastest, most complete graphics acceleration products on the market today."

　　The TNT accelerates 2D and 3D with resolutions topping off at 1900x1200. Other new high-end features that make the chip stand out are 32-bit color rendering, a 24-bit Z-buffer, and a new dual-pipeline 3D rendering engine. The design of the chip allows the 3D rendering engine to render two pixels per cycle for faster fill rates (besides providing more advanced effects like single-pass trilinear and anisotropic texture filtering and bump mapping).

　　The Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT will be available in early September for US$199.