No Regrets!
Written: Feb 09 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stable, cool, and fast! On board T&L works. Toll-free support.
Cons: Elsa driver releases are slow.
The Bottom Line: The geForce 2GTS is a significant step up from the original - it's faster, cooler, less buggy, and features a beast of a T&L engine.
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| rhreynolds's Full Review: Elsa GLADIAC, (32 MB) AGP Video Card |
The Gladiac is my second ELSA video card. The first was an Erazor X GeForce SDR. For the life of me I could not get this card to run on my Athlon 650MHz system with 256MB RAM. Of course, many of us may recall that the original geForce cards were simply 'allergic' to the Athlon processor running on some motherboards. So I had to settle with an ATI Rage Fury 128 Pro.
The most notable differences between the first and second-generation geForce chips are heat and power consumption. The Erazor X was built on a .22micron fabrication process, used about 36W of power and got hotter than my CPU! The Gladiac uses a smaller .18-micron process, consumes 18W and runs cool to the touch even after some intensive MDK2. Other architectural differences include a second-generation T&L engine, DDR memory, and support for Full Screen Anti Aliasing.
T&L is the best innovation to come to 3D. There are four stages in the 3D rendering pipeline: transform, lighting, setup, and rendering. Previously, the first two were CPU dependent, which meant extra work for the processor whenever you played a game. By offloading the transform and lighting functions from the CPU, nVidia's GPU essentially performs all the 3D functions itself. In my benchmarking, at 800x600 in 32bpp, enabling T&L in the game actually increased frame rates by 5fps.
Another feature FSAA was not so impressive. Unlike the 3Dfx Voodoo 4/5 which does FSAA in hardware, nVidia's implementation is less complex. FSAA is supposed to reduce the stair-step jagged edge effect that you sometimes observe in 3D objects. This effect is naturally reduced as you increase the game's resolution. So taking this in mind, nVidia's FSAA actually increases the resolution at which the texels are rendered by the card, and then steps it down to your lower gameplay resolution. The result is an undesirable performance hit. With the same settings at which I tested T&L, there was a 20fps loss in frame rates.
I benchmarked the card using my favourite game: Bioware's MDK2. This is the ideal benchmark because it is OpenGL based, T&L enabled, and pushes some serious textured polygons. I compared the Gladiac to the ATI Rage Fury Pro. All resolutions were in 32-bit colour, max textures, trilinear filtering and T&L enable for the Gladiac.
640x480 Rage Fury 60; Gladiac 120
800x600 Rage Fury 41; Gladiac 85
1024x768 Rage Fury 29; Gladiac 53
Direct3D games like Rayman2 and Need For Speed 4 were harder to benchmark but I can say that gameplay and graphics quality in both games is tremendously improved. There's never a hitch and I can finally do a smooth two player game in NFS 4.
My only gripe with ELSA is that the drivers aren't updated often enough. But this is minor since nVidia's Detonator 6.5 reference drivers work well with the card, and feature the overclocking slider. I've found ELSA's tech reps to be smart and patient - when you can get them.
I got this card as a buy.com deal of the day so it cost me only $129! Put a dent in my American Express but I don't regret a minute of it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 130
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Epinions.com ID:
rhreynolds
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Member: Raymond Reynolds
Location: NYC
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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