X-bit labs

ELSA GLADIAC GeForce2 GTS Review

Category: Video

by FastSite

[ 06/21/2000 | 12:00 AM ]

One more graphics card on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS GPU duplicating the reference design. The graphics card from ELSA wasone of the first to appear in retail and can't boast anythign particularly remarkable.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Overclocking
  
• Installation and Drivers
  
• Performance
  
• Conclusions
  

ELSA Company is very famous not only all over Germany but also all over Europe for its monitors and a wide range of various graphics cards. For a long time the company has been focusing on very expensive graphics cards for professional usage and only two years ago they entered the gaming graphics cards market. Unfortunately, ELSA products are quite expensive that is why it is very hard for ELSA to compete with Asian companies presenting their products for much lower prices in the graphics market. However, we have to point out that ELSA goods are known for impeccable quality and reliable warranty. The company is also very proud of the fact that they use only high-quality components, which have stood all the tests in the company's laboratories.

However, high prices very often have a certain frightening effect on the users. So, on offering you a review of one more graphics card from this company we really hope that ELSA and the customers will manage to find a "compromise": the company will drop the prices so that to make its product demanded and the users will take a closer look at this card, which will hopefully prove not in the least worse than all other ELSA products. Especially, since ErazorX graphics card, which is still available for one of the lowest prices, is very good evidence that this important compromise is possible.

So, let's take a graphics card from a new graphics accelerators family: GeForce2 GTS from ELSA, aka GLADIAC, which has been available in retail for quite a long while already.

Closer Look

Here are the main features of ELSA GLADIAC:

• NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, 256-bit GPU
• 25 million polygons/sec, 800 million pixels/sec
• 350MHz RAMDAC resolution up to 2048x1536 32-bit Z-buffer/stencil
• Display Modes:
  
  

  Resolution	Colors	Vertical Refresh Rate
  640x480	8/16/32 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  800x600	8/16/32 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  1024x768	8/16 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  1024x768	32 bits	60Hz to 200Hz
  1152x864	8/16 bits	60Hz to 200Hz
  1152x864	32 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x960	8/16 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x960	32 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1280x1024	8/16 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x1024	32 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1600x900	8/16 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1600x900	32 bits	60Hz to 120Hz
  1600x1200	8/16 bits	60Hz to 120Hz
  1600x1200	32 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1080	8/16 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1080	32 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1200	8/16 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1200	32 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1440	8/16 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1440	32 bits	60Hz to 75Hz
  2048x1536	8/16 bits	60Hz to 75Hz
  2048x1536	32 bits	60Hz

We won't go into details describing the peculiarities and features of GPU GeForce2 GTS from NVIDIA. If you have the mood,take a look at the following review for more info.

Now comes the card itself.

The card features AGP 2x/4x interface, 32MB 6ns DDR SGRAM located in 8 chips on both sides of the PCB.

The memory chips are made by Infineon and are designed for 166MHz.

The memory works at this frequency. Note that sometimes the end clock frequency of DDR memory is given twice as high as it actually is, because these numbers look more impressive. However, it hardly matters for practice. In other words, if you see that DDR memory working frequency is 333MHz, then you should read it as 166MHz.

Further examination of the PCB showed that the graphics card hardly differs from the reference card. The chipset has an ordinary active flat cooler sending the airflow sideward. There was no daughter card with a TV-Out on the piece we had at our disposal. The PCB is of light-green color, which is very close to Creative traditional coloring.

The PCB is also equipped with special connectors for a daughter card with TV-Out and has a special empty spot for digital monitors connector.

We got this graphics card as a test sample in OEM package. And the serial ELSA graphics cards are supplied in traditional ELSA boxes and go together with a rather rich set of software, including a DVD-player.

Overclocking

As you can see from the previous section, it is rather doubtful that overclocking may appear fruitful with a cooler like that. And we have to confess that our fears turned out absolutely grounded. The chipset could reach the maximum of 220MHz and the memory - only 380MHz. These values are more than shy especially against the background of the previously reviewed graphics cards. Nevertheless, we still hope to get a certain performance gain since the memory working frequency has risen from 333 to 380MHz, which promises a considerable growth of performance in 32bit color. We have already pointed out in the previous reviews that a combination of a fast graphics processor and a relatively slow memory with the end clock frequency of 333MHz makes the graphics card a very ill-balanced device.

Installation and Drivers

And now we are going to speak about pure practice. At first take a look at our testbed configuration:

• Intel Pentium III 733MHz CPU;
• Chaintech 6ATA4 (VIA Apollo Pro133A); mainboard;
• 256MB PC133 SDRAM;
• IBM DPTA 20GB HDD;
• ViewSonic P810 (21") and NOKIA 447Xav (17'') monitors
• Windows 98 SE.

The work with any graphics card starts with the drivers installation. So, did we. For our tests we used the drivers from ELSA version 0202-0040 (based on NVIDIA ver. 5.16 drivers).

This driver set includes almost the whole lot of 3D graphics settings from NVIDIA reference drivers that is why we will mention only those properties pages, which differ from the reference and can be of interest to you.

This Direct3D properties page allows changing Vsync as well as the Anti-Aliasing mode.

As you see, this page allows changing the supersampling coefficient (you can choose one of the 7 available positions or just disable it at all). Besides, you can enable this effect in all Direct3D games. We have paid special attention to this function in our ASUS AGP-V7700 Review.

This properties page for OpenGL settings includes anti-aliasing enabling, without changing its parameters though.

The drivers also include a special overclocking utility.

Besides, you also get the opportunity to easily change the 2D settings, namely the monitor parameters and refresh rates.

Having installed the drivers, you can see an icon in the system tray, which will activate all the settings if clicked.

Performance

As usual, we will start with 2D graphics. In the previous reviews we have said that we liked very much the quality and performance in 2D shown by the cards on GeForce2 GTS. We can only state that ELSA GLADIAC proved up to the mark in 2D (it seems to be the similarity to NVIDIA reference design that tells). Graphics cards of this class meet the requirements of the absolute majority of users. And now that the 2D graphics quality of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based cards has been significantly improved compared to the quality provided by GeForce256, even the owners of good 21" monitors should be pleased. Note that we said "good" monitors! The same thing is true for smaller monitors as well. So, ELSA GLADIAC graphics card shows very good image quality in 2D graphics and wins a really high rank.

We will use the following three games to consider the performance of ELSA GLADIAC in 3D-graphics:

• Rage Expendable (Direct3D, multitexturing);
• id Software Quake3 v.1.16h (OpenGL, multitexturing);
• BioWare MDK2 DEMO (OpenGL, Hardware T&L, multitexturing).

These tools should be quite enough to give us a good idea of the graphics card's performance when working via two main API. For a more illustrative comparison we added the results shown by two more graphics cards to our charts: ASUS AGP-V7700 and NVIDIA reference card based on GeForce2 GTS. We will also show the performance of the overclocked ELSA GLADIAC.

You can see pretty well that ELSA GLADIAC runs nearly neck and neck with NVIDIA reference Quake3 and Expendable. However, the performance shown by the overclocked card strikes you as something extraordinary. The performance gain is quite tangible. Of course, we can't generalize the results shown by this graphics card and refer them to all cards based on GeForce2 GTS, however, we have every reason to hope that overclocking fans will easily find a nice piece for their extreme to please their sore eye.

And the results shown in a new test we are using, MDK2 Demo, give us a good idea of what Hardware T&L can mean for the today's games. Here we have to stress that we do not imply the newest games (with the graphics of a totally different rank, which calculate the physics of the acting characters as well as of all the surrounding objects, using AI, etc.), but the games of Quake3 level. Here we see that in 16bit color only at 1600x1200 software transformation and lighting provides the same performance level as Hardware T&L, and at all other resolutions the CPU slows down the graphics card while the Hardware T&L provides a much higher performance. And in 32bit color the performance equality was achieved at 1280x1024 already. What does it mean? Well, it means that at higher resolutions the fillrate stands in the way towards further performance increase, and the geometrical coprocessor doesn't save the situation.

The package we received didn't contain any accompanying software and hence no DVD-player. That is why we used WinDVD 2000 to test the DVD-video playback. The results were very encouraging and satisfied us quite nicely. The image quality was just perfect (which has become typical of the graphics cards of this type) and the CPU utilization didn't exceed 25-28%.

Conclusions

So, ELSA GLADIAC didn't yield to the reference card from NVIDIA. ELSA GLADIAC graphics card is an exact copy of NVIDIA reference design, it boasts pretty mediocre overclockability. We would like to stress that the card's overclockability depends on a particular piece. As for us, we didn't find anything peculiar in the graphics card we reviewed, which could positively differ the card from its analogues (such as ASUS AGP-V7700, for example). That is why we wouldn't dare recommend this graphics card since its price is still too high.

Highs:

• Super high performance, which corresponds to the most powerful today's accelerators;
• High quality card design;
• Rich set of the accompanying software (with the serial cards).

Lows:

• No digital monitors connector;
• Low overclockability;
• Too high card cost (over $320).