Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce3
Apr 27th, 2001 | By Archive
Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce3
Date
: 04/28/01 – 01:20:48 AM
Author
:
Category
: Video Cards
Manufacturer: Elsa
Price: ???
Introduction
I can still remember entering these big halls @ CeBIT about a month ago. I couldn’t wait to catch the first glimp of the new monster in town called the GeForce 3 from nVidia. And because CeBIT just had to be the official presentation and worldwide introduction of the GeForce 3 GPU,I certainly didn’t have to wait very long to actually see one. Every respectable video card manufacturer wants to be the first to ship their GeForce 3 based video cards to the customer. Some of the manufacturers just use nVidia’s reference design GeForce 3 as an example for their own designs while others try to make something really special of their GeForce 3 card (e.g. coloured PCB, fancy heatsinks, etc.). All the GeForce 3 loving is great, nothing I can say about that, but why do we have to love that GF3 so much? DO we have to love it or should we hate it instead? What’s so special about it?
We will try to explain the GF3 specs and features as easy as possible and we will also give you quite a few benchmark results from popular benches like Quake 3 Arena, 3DMark2001, VulpineGL and AquaMark.
You’ll probably notice that we have some new benchmarks for you that you haven’t seen in one of our reviews before. The reason for that, is that the GeForce 3 has some interesting new features that weren’t implemented in older benchmarks like 3DMark2000.
The peeps over @ Elsa were kind enough to send us a review sample of their latest product, the Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce 3. Before we take a look at what this card can do in the benchmarks and how it performs, I suggest we first take a look at the specs … Yeah, here they come baby!
Specifications
Graphics processor
NVIDIA GeForce3
processor clock: 200 MHz
Memory equipment
64-MB DDR SDRAM, access time 3.8 ns
460-MHz effective memory clock
Lightspeed Memory Architecture
RAMDAC/pixel cycle
350 MHz
BIOS
Support of VESA BIOS 3.0
Bus-System
AGP 2x/4x, including fast writes and execute mode
Features
Graphics standards
DirectX 8, DirectX 7, OpenGL API
2D features
256 bit 2D acceleration, optimized for 32, 24, 16, 15, and 8-bit color depth, hardware cursor in TrueColor, multi buffering (double, triple and quadruple for fluid movements and video playback)
3D features
256-bit engine with HyperTexel architecture, optimized acceleration for Direct3D and OpenGL API, complete DirectX8 support, 32-bit Z and stencil buffer, single-pass multi texturing, full-scene anti-aliasing, high-quality texture filtering, including anisotropic; advanced per-pixel texturing for perspective correction, fog and depth cueing, texture compression
nFinite FX
engine fully programmable effect processor for realistic 3D representation, e.g. volumetric fog, particle effects, reflective bump mapping and animated water
HDTV- und DVD-Playback
Extended motion compensation for full screen video playback in all DVD and HDTV resolutions, video acceleration for MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and Indeo
TV-out
(optional) Connection for S video and Composite/FBAS (with included adapter); PAL (max. 800 x 600 pixels), NTSC (max. 640 x 480 pixels)
Standards
DPMS, DDC2B, plug&play
Connectors
Monitor: VGA-D-Shell (15 pin)
1 x video-out (S-video connection, FBAS via the included adapter)
Dimensions
173 x 108 mm (ATX format, plus mounting bracket)
Operating systems
Windows 98, Windows 2000 , Windows NT 4.0, Windows ME
Additional features
Windows utilities like ELSA WINman Suite beinhaltet ELSA-Driver-Settings, ELSA Info, ELSASmartRefresh, ELSA SmartResolution
Package contents
(may vary with initial deliveries)
Manual
German, English, French, Italian and Spanish (on CD)
Installation Guide
German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish (printed)
Drivers and Software
Software DVD player ELSAmovie 2000, GLADIAC 920 CD with drivers and utilities
Bonus game
Giants: Citizen Kabuto full version, optimized for the ELSA GLADIAC 920
Specs In Detail
As you can see on the list above, the Elsa Gladiac 920 has a very impressive list of features and specs! Of course the package contains a well-written manual, a driver CD and the GF3-optimized version of the game : Giants. Isn’t that lovely?! :) The Gladiac 920 features the GeForce 3 GPU from nVidia running at 200MHz and 64MB 3.8ns DDR RAM running a 460MHz effective memory clock (230MHz DDR). Have you noticed that I said the core clock of this GeForce 3 card is running at 200MHz? Doesn’t the GeForce2 Ultra run a 250MHz clock? Sure it is, but that doesn’t mean the GeForce 3 is slower than the GeForce 2 Ultra. All the GeForce3-based video cards will be released with the same 200MHz core clock and 64MB 3.8ns DDR RAM running at 460MHz. It’s pretty obvious that Elsa has followed the nVidia reference design quite well. In addition to the default VGA Out, the Elsa Gladiac 920 also offers a TV-Out connection for S-video. Because not everyone owns a brandnew TV with a S-video connector, you will also receive an adapter to transform from S-video to Composite/FBAS.
The GeForce 3 GPU, codenamed NV20, more than 57 million transistors and is manufactured using the 0.15 process technology. To give you an idea of how much 57 million transistor is, I’ll remember you to the fact that my AMD Tbird 1.3GHz ‘only’ has 37 million transistors … That’s 20 million transistors less than the GeForce3 GPU.
Now that we know the basics of this video card, I think it’s time to start to talk about the features that make the GF3 GPU as special as it is. I think about terms like :
- nfiniteFX Engine
- Vertex Shaders
- Pixel Shaders
- Lightspeed Memory Architecture
- High Resolution Antialiasing (HRAA)
nfiniteFX Engine
Thanks to the nfiniteFX engine, the GeForce3 GPU becomes the world’s first programmable 3D graphics chip architecture. But what does this nfiniteFX (infinite effects in full) engine do to your games? Well, this engine can deliver unprecedented visual realism on your PC. Textures like wrinkles or dimples on faces of game characters will appear almost photorealistic and more real than you’ve ever seen before. The nfiniteFX programmable engine gives game developers the freedom to create a virtually infinite number of special effects that allows the gamers to experience a new realistic gaming experience that has never been seen before.
Vertex Shaders
Programmable Vertex Shaders are one of the most revolutionary new functions of the GeForce 3 GPU. These Vertex Shaders add special effects to objects in a 3D scene and lets game developers adjust these effects by loading new software instructions into the Vertex Shader Memory.
Pixel Shaders
Pixel Shaders on the other hand, are graphics functions that calculate effects on a per-pixel basis. You’ll understand that if 2 million pixels need to be rendered with all effects for each frame at 50 frames per second, the GPU will definately know what to do! The GeForce3 handles this task by using Pixel Shaders. Programmable Pixel Shaders will again provide developers with control for determining the lighting, shading, and color of each individual pixel, allowing them to create some unique surface effects.
Lightspeed Memory Architecture
Memory and bus bandwidth have always been and will remain critical factors in determining graphics performance and quality. Together with the GeForce3 GPU comes a great number of advances in graphics architecture that will significantly improve the GPU’s efficiency with memory and bus bandwith which results in new level of performance and maybe even more important, improved image quality. By using an advanced technology like Lightspeed Memory Architecture, the GF3 tries to solve pixel bandwidth problems and reduce bandwidth consumption as much as possible. This results in the GeForce3 being able to make twice the use of memory bandwidth than any previous traditional architecture.
High-Resolution AntiAliasing (HRAA)
Supersampling : This is an antialiasing technique that renders the screen image at a much higher resolution than the display mode it is meant to be for, and then scales and filters the much bigger image to the final and smaller resolution before it is sent to the display. Did you know that this technique was already implemented in the GeForce2 GPUs?
Personally, I’ve never enabled these antialiasing techniques because they only caused a major decrease in framerates without much increase of the image quality. Most of the time, the framerate would even fall back so much that the game became unplayable.
Multisampling : This is a more sophisticated antialiasing technique than supersampling that produces higher quality output with much higher performance, but the basic idea stays the same compared to supersampling.
Quincunx AA : I’m not going to explain how Quincunx antialiasing works, because that would just lead us too far. There are well written articles on the web explaining these techniques to the very bottom. nVidia claims that the Quincunx antialiasing technology offers FSAA 4x visual quality at a performance comparable to FSAA 2x.
I have tried to explain some new features of the GeForce3 very briefly instead of boring you with a shitload of mathematical bull. Where it all comes down to is :The GeForce3 GPU looks really promising and should offer wonderful image quality and high end performance.
Installation
Installing this beast should be no problem, even if you’ve never done this before. Just open your case and push it in the AGP slot. This is all toooo easy! That’s why we will skip this part of the review this time … Oops, too late :)
Now that you all know how to put the Gladiac 920 into your motherboard, we can continue with the review and have a look at the benchmarks. No, wait, let’s first see how well the Elsa Gladiac 920 overclocks …
Overclocking That Gladiac
After some crashes during gaming and benchmarking, I managed to achieve a 225MHz core clock and 485MHz memory speed. This setting ran along just fine but as soon as I got the core clock and/or memory speed up by 5MHz, I again experienced random crashes during my Quake3 Arena gaming and sometimes 3DMark2k1 wouldn’t even startup properly. I know 225MHz/485MHz cannot be called a wild overclock, because we only gain a few MHz as the Elsa Gladiac 920 is clocked at 200MHz/460MHz by default. However, you’ll be surpised what these few extra MHz can do to your framerate!
Now, let’s head on to the benchies …
Benchmarking
Test system :
- AOpen HQ45 case
- AMD Athlon 1.3Ghz
- Thermaltake Volcano II (cooling)
- Abit KT7A-RAID (YH bios)
- 256MB PC133 RAM CAS2
- Elsa Gladiac 920 (GeForce 3 + deto 11.01)
- Western Digital 45GB UDMA100 7200rpm hard drive
- Win2k (with SP1) + VIA 4in1 4.29 + DirectX 8a (of course!)
ALL TESTS IN 32BIT!
3DMark2001
Here's how the Elsa Gladiac 920 performs with 3DMark2k1. I would like you to notice the huge decrease in framerate when using Quincunx AA, but framerate never drops down enough to make 3DMark2k1 stutter. Overclocking the Gladiac 920 gives it even more power! Damn, this baby sure is fast!! I know you guys without a GeForce3 can only drewl on scores like these, don't ya :)
Quake 3 Arena v1.17
Well, don’t these figures speak for themselves? The Athlon 1.3GHz and the GeForce 3 will suck every last frame out of the Quake3 engine. Again, I’d like to note that the framerate was very acceptable when using Quincunx AA.
AquaMark
Another new test or benchmark, whatever you like it, is AquaMark. This is actually the benchmark version of a marvelous game called, AquaNox. This benchmark really shows what the GF3 GPU can do to a game’s image quality and performance.
Vulpine GLmark
We have one more new benchmark for you guys today, Vulpine GLmark. This relatively unknown benchmark might be the successor of the more popular Quake 3 Arena timedemo benchmark. Unlike Q3A, Vulpine GLmark allows you to enable special GeForce3 features to increase visual quality a lot. Pretty cool stuff, if you ask me. ‘GeForce 3 rules!’ … oops, sorry for that ;)
Good
- Solid, sweet performance
- Outperforms the competition
- Unseen image quality
- Stunning new effects
- TV-Out
Bad
- Really expensive!
- No noticeable performance boost in current games
- Requires a high end CPU
Conclusion
Well, I’m not trying to say you should grab your bike, go to the nearest shop that has a GF3 card for sale and buy it … nope, I wouldn’t dare to do such thing. But you’ve seen the benchmarks and the images. The Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce 3 performs like a real champ. Although the card doesn’t overclock as well as I had hoped for, the frame rates remain well above GeForce 2 Ultra level in all current games. The only MAJOR drawback here is the price. I still can’t believe the Elsa Gladiac 920 (and all the GeForce3 cards on the market today) are that expensive. If you can afford this card, you won’t be disappointed, that’s for sure! But most people just can’t spend their hard earned $$$ to a video card. Because after all, this is ‘just’ a video card. The choice is yours, but if you got the $$$, go for the Elsa Gladiac 920! Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that this package comes with a free Elsa Gladiac 920 mousemat as a bonus!! :-))