Introduction

CreaTe-It has outdone itself this time round with its brand new offering for the Christmas season : the awesome AWEMEGA 1024 AGP. This is a multimedia card, meaning it has integrated sound and video capabilities, and it fits into an empty AGP slot, freeing up precious PCI slots that users claim they never have enough of. This card employs something called "4D Rendering", which is a technology patented by CreaTe-It which gives an emmersive feeling to multimedia output. We will look at the graphics and sound features seperately.

Graphics Features

The AWEMEGA features a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) called the "Hiroshima45" , similar to nVidia's GeForce256, which is mounted with dual fans just to keep this awesome processor cool during those Quake2 sessions. The GPU features "transform", "lighting", "worldview" etc., giving 3D games a hyper-realism never seen before. The GPU is fully compatible with Microsoft's new ActiveReality drivers made specially for this card! The downside is that this card works only in MS Windows, but who plays 3D games in other OS's anyway?

Sound Features

CreaTe-It has always been known for superior sound products, and the AWEMEGA is no different. It supports 3D sound (all-important feature), sound-texturing, active realtime buffering, and new 32-bit fidelity recording! And for MIDI, it comes with the tried and tested OPL3 FM chip for superb FM synthesis.

Benchmark

This card runs at 44,693,000 MFLOPS, and can render 14 billion polygons per second (8 billion if you use Gourard-shaded sound textures). Check this baby out the comparision chart below.

Connection

At first glance, you might think the AWEMEGA has standard line-in and mic input jacks. But the truth is far more exciting! The AWEMEGA 1024 incorporates incredibly new mono recording technology that ensures high fidelity output on your 10 watt speakers. The output comes from the large digital jack you see on the left. More pins mean more bits. And more bits mean better sound. In fact, this has so many pins, it beats out most VGA cards (and this is just a sound card too!)

Conclusion

The AWEMEGA is the perfect choice for multimedia professionals, but it does come with a hefty price tag of US$1200. However, Create-It is offering the card with bundled 10-watt speakers, so this should be a real deal!

Don't forget to get two AWEMEGA 1024's so you can get incredible stereo sound!! (you will need at least two AGP slots on your computer to install both of them)

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