Creative Technology, best known for its Sound Blaster line of sound cards, has announced that it will acquire 3Dlabs, one of the top makers of high-end workstation graphics cards. The direct result of this acquisition is that Creative plans to release a gaming graphics card based on 3Dlabs technology as soon as late this year. Creative representative Phil OShaughnessy said the company is targeting its new consumer graphics product for Christmas.

　　Creative has produced graphics cards based on Nvidia's graphics chips but stopped selling cards in the US because it couldn't maintain profit margins as a third-party board producer buying chips from Nvidia. In fact, the US market for Nvidia-based products has been so competitive that two other major companies--Hercules and ELSA--have also left that retail niche to primarily Taiwanese board producers. Creative has, however, continued to produce cards for the European market. Creative hopes that by owning 3Dlabs and exclusively producing cards based on 3Dlabs chips, it will establish a graphics division with sustainable profits more like those of its successful Sound Blaster audio business.

　　Although 3Dlabs is known more for its workstation graphics than for gaming cards, 3Dlabs has graphics technology in development that it calls "scalable," meaning that it's intended to fit a dual role in both gaming and workstation cards. Creative has held a significant stake in 3Dlabs since the graphics company formed in 1994, and in the early days of 3D graphics, Creative produced cards based on the 3Dlabs Permedia chip. 3Dlabs' most recent gaming chip was the Permedia 2, which came in 4MB and 8MB cards.

　　Apart from specific hardware designs, 3Dlabs also took a leading role over from SGI in refining the OpenGL API starting last year. Unlike the Direct3D graphics standard, which is developed by Microsoft for Windows PCs, OpenGL is a multiplatform industry standard. However, OpenGL's original intent was for workstation graphics, and in recent years the standard hasn't kept up as well with developments in game graphics. 3Dlabs' push toward a spec for a new 2.0 version of OpenGL, which is currently at version 1.3. At this point, it's not clear how Creative's acquisition will affect the direction of 3Dlabs technology or its efforts with OpenGL.