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Creative Labs is one of the most prolific multimedia companies, with a high brand recognition that competitors would give their eyeteeth for. This all started long ago with the debut of the SoundBlaster line of soundcards, which remain best sellers to this day. Creative Labs is also a force in the 3D video market, occupying many of the best-seller positions for video cards. This wasn't always so, and CL took their first baby steps with the Graphics Blaster 3D, a forgettable card featuring the lamentable Cirrus Logic Laguna3D accelerator and 4 MB of RAMBUS (RDRAM) memory. The Graphics Blaster 3D was so slow that Quake benchmarks were timed using a calendar, and even the lethargic S3 ViRGE used it as a punching bag. Following this inauspicious beginning, Creative Labs kept their 3D card line-up humming with satisfactory products utilizing the Rendition Verite and Permedia 2 chipsets, but the best was yet to come. The hype surrounding the 3dfx Voodoo2 was not seen before and may not be seen again, and by being the first vendor to offer the card, Creative Labs' 3D Blaster Voodoo2 rode atop the wave of popularity. Subsequent Creative Labs 3D cards haven't had this sort of pure impact, but the various NVIDIA TNT, TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra boards were very well received in their own right.

With 3dfx buying STB and long-time rival Diamond Multimedia swallowed up by S3, Creative Labs and the entire 3rd-party graphics market has undergone a radical shift away from 3dfx and S3 and straight towards NVIDIA and the ultra-hot GeForce 256. The GeForce 256 has been coined a GPU, or Graphic Processing Unit, by NVIDIA and is a single-chip processor combining integrated transform & lighting, triangle set-up and rendering engines into a single chip. The GeForce 256 is manufactured on a .22u die, comprised of over 22 million transistors and capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second. The main thrust of the GeForce 256 is to offload much of the graphics set-up and processing away from CPU and onto the GPU.