The retail card I reviewed came in a standard box with all the reference materials and driver disks so you should be getting everything in this review with a retail board. I had an Outrageous3D card (previously reviewed) in my test computer with the newest Detonator drivers (detonator 2's) installed. I pulled the AGP card and replaced it with the Gladiac and restarted to an easy detection of the card and installation of the drivers. Especially easy since the right driver set was installed previously with the DDR card. The reference drivers were used for testing. Although I initially used reference drivers, I'll install the proprietary drivers for testing in the Driver Set and software section. The first thing I really noticed was the desktop and OGL games were unusually dark, upping the gamma and the brightness control in the drivers quickly fixed this though. The included documentation consisted of written installation guide plus more help on the CD if needed. The card itself is similar to an Erazor X2 in the fact that the heatsink is practically the same but the PCB looks a lot more occupied in the Gladiac, did I mention it isn't purple? There are 2 Video input/output ports on the board itself that is supposedly for HDTV and other video sources. We have yet to see any manufacturer take advantage of these internal jacks. Like the DDR, there are 4 chips of Infineon DDR SGRAM at 8MB each. The HSF is mounted onto the chip using what appears to be thermal tape, secure but not as effective in transferring heat as thermal paste is.

The Gladiac is a very good card in terms of 2D, although the RAMDAC wasn't changed much from it's previous incarnation, the 2D still looks great just like it did on the GeForce. When going up to 1600x1200 though, there was some distortion when viewing text but nothing a large monitor cant help. The refresh rates were good; I keep mine at 1280x1024x16@85Hz when using the computer. Anything below 85 just hurts my eyes =). At the beginning of testing, I initially installed the card with it's own driver set but when I restarted that card would not recognize it's own drivers and load the standard VGA ones. This was strange to me so I tried the reference drivers, which worked fine. On a side note, Elsa has recently released new drivers for the Gladiac. I then found out that in order to get the new Elsa drivers in, the old reference drivers had to be removed. After that everything went fine.

There are plenty of uses for this card but what do we actually care about? Games! The Gladiac supports the newest OGL and D3D out of the box along with Glide. Strange as it is when I went into UT, it said one of the supported API's were Glide so I selected Glide. The program gave me an error but it let me continue. I watched the flyby going at around 20fps and when I selected Practice Session from the menu, UT promptly restarted my computer. I think it's safe to say that the Gladiac doesn't support Glide =). Heck, who knows what the software engineers are doing at Nvidia, maybe we'll see Glide support in a few months.