One of a series of UPA graphics accelerators produced by Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s through early 2000s. The Creator3D, and its entry-level kin, the Creator, debuted in 1995 in the Ultra 1 Creator workstation. These used the horizontal-format version, which was also used in the Sun Ultra 2 and the Enterprise 450. The vertical version appeared two years later in the Sun Ultra 10 and Ultra 30. Sun ceased production of the Creator and Creator3D in 2002, with the Blade 1000 being the last workstation to ship with them. (Series 3 Creator3D cards work in the Blade 2000, however).
There were three series of Creator cards produced, each running at higher clock speeds with architectural improvements for improved performance. The first series, Series 1, were called FFB (Fast Frame Buffer). The later cards were FFB2 (Series 2) and FFB2+ (Series 3). Although the naming seems to imply that the Series 2 was a larger improvement than Series 3, the inverse is true. Series 3 cards are considerably quicker than their Series 2 predecessors, which are in turn only somewhat faster than the Series 1 cards. Within each series, both a 2D version with 5MB of RAM, and a 3D version with 16MB of RAM exist. The 3D version is also faster in 2D, supporting double-buffering and pixmap caching with its extra RAM. In 3D mode, the extra RAM provides texture memory and a Z-buffer.