The retail drivers that come with this card isn't bad at all, in fact, they are a couple of features that the drivers have that you might want.

SmartRefresh is a great utility for finding that balance between comfort and performance. We all know that the higher your refresh rate the lower your performance is. But if you set your refresh rate too low, you will be very uncomfortable because some people are very sensitive with screen flickering. While other cards only let you choose between 60, 65, 70, 75, 85, and 100Hz, Elsa's SmartRefresh lets you set the refresh rates in small increments (1Hz) so you get the best out of your monitor. Also, some monitors might be limited to say 84Hz and your card can only go in increments of 75, 85, 100. You would normally have to settle for 75 but with this software, you can set it to 84Hz. This is a very cool program to have and a neat feature with Elsa cards.

SmartResolution is a little like SmartRefresh in the manner in which they operate. In the simplest way, SmartResolution is a program that lets you set your desktop to the highest resolution you possibly. You can set your horizontal resolution in 32 pixels steps and vertical resolution in 1-pixel steps to get the highest resolution you can comfortably work in.

The Elsa drivers are based on the reference drivers (v5.16) but they have some extra features to benefit Elsa users such as support for Revelator 3D glasses. So unless you cannot live without your Revelators, you will not need the Elsa drivers. Throughout history, reference drivers were known for performing better than proprietary drivers and this is no exception. The Elsa drivers do not give any increased performance at all. Going back to the base of the Elsa drivers, they were version 5.16 of the Nvidia reference drivers. When the Gladiac came out with the full retail driver set, the 5.16 drivers were in beta form and were considered the fastest detonator drivers yet but they still had some incompatibilities and bugs. Notably, they also had features such as anti-aliasing on board for OpenGL and D3D. Also, while the reference drivers need a registry hack to enable the overclocking panel, Elsa's drivers have an overclocking panel already enabled. It would indicate that Elsa is almost promoting users to overclock the Gladiac.