Nvidia's highly acclaimed new chipset, the GeForce2 has been causing a stir lately. When Nvidia's PR monsters declared that the GeForce2 could do real time Pixar quality animation, Pixar fired back by saying "Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the CPUs on our UltraSparc server?" He then goes on to say that in 10-15 years, Nvidia might achieve real time Pixar quality animation. Although not as powerful as a million dollar computer, the GeForce2 is definitely not a toy and we have Elsa's new Gladiac board in our hands today for review. First of all, let me start off by telling you a little bit about the GeForce2 chipset since this is SystemLogic's first review on it. Expect a GeForce2 general review from us in a little while.

As a product of the 6-month product cycle, the GeForce2 seems to come into a time when everyone is still enjoying his or her new GeForce1. But of course upgrade is necessary to some people and they feel like Nvidia is cheating them by delivering too much of a good thing at too high of a cost. Too much of a good thing means tons of buyers for Nvidia and virtual elimination of competition. By the time another company releases a card, Nvidia has already released 2. Of course this is perfectly legal because Nvidia is nowhere close to even being almost a monopoly.

What is the GeForce2 GTS you may ask. The GeForce2 is basically a GeForce made on a 0.18-micron process allowing for higher clock speeds and a lot of new features such as Giga Texel Shading (GTS). DDR Ram has been eliminated from the new GeForce2 for performance and bandwidth reasons so don't expect a low cost version of the GTS anytime soon. As for plumbing, the GTS has 4 rendering pipelines just like the GeForce did. But the GTS can process 2 textures per clock in the pipeline while the GeForce could only process 1. This means the GTS is capable of rendering scenes twice as fast as the original GeForce running at the same core speed. Lets take a look at the core and memory speeds. The original GeForce ran at a steady 120MHz and overclocking it could maybe bump it up to 150MHz for some people and a little bit higher for some others. The GTS's core speeds runs at a super-high 200MHz thanks mainly to its new 0.18-micron process.

So the GeForce at 120*4 = 480 megapixels/sec fillrate is still fast but the GTS at 200*4 = 800 is a lot faster. Remember the 2 Texel's per pipeline per clock? This gives the GTS a blistering 200*8 = 1600 megatexels/sec. 1.6 gigatexels. This is where the GTS finally clicks. Nvidia again holds the fillrate crown having 800p/1600t while the Voodoo5 (it's closest competitor) holds 667/667. Nvidia will keep the crown at least for another 2 months until the Voodoo5 6000 comes out with its 1.3 gigapixel fillrate.

Alright, enough of the technical stuff, I'm seeing numbers floating everywhere. Lets move onto some of the other features of the chipset. Back to the RAM issue. All of the GTS board floating around today feature DDR RAM because using SDRAM on a chip like the GeForce2 will only demean it's performance by restricting it's memory bandwidth. The Geforce2 ships with a 333MHz DDR RAM bus speed up from the 300 we saw in the original GeForce. The original SDR GeForce had 2.7GB/s of memory bandwidth while the GTS has 5.3GB/s. All the while, even with all of the upgrades Nvidia is making to the chipset they seem to have left the 128-bit memory bus. Believe it or not the memory bandwidth is a bottleneck to the potential performance of the GeForce2.

The GeForce2 will begin shipping in 32MB DDR configurations although SDRAM is also supported in the chipset. The GeForce2 is aimed towards enthusiasts and if you wanted a board with SDRAM, you can easily pick up a SDR GeForce. If you wanted a SDR card, you're probably not a heavy gamer. In any case, the GeForce1 is still a formidable chipset. 64MB DDR GeForce 2 GTS cards should be appearing in a little over a month from now.

Power consumption was a big issue with the original GeForce with users saying they suck more power than they power supply can afford. By using the .018-micron process, Nvidia has solved this issue by cutting the GTS's power requirements (8W) to almost half of what the original GeForce needed (16W). In comparison, the Voodoo5 needs (44W). Needless to say, you won't need to be plugging in any extra power connectors to the board anytime soon. With less power comes less heat. Today's graphics cards are notorious for being fire demons. Not that they actually catch fire but they really get hot enough to singe a few fingers. I remember a time when I was playing around in my case after playing a few rounds of quake and I nearly melted my hand trying to take out my Voodoo3. To combat this, cardmakers are doing a variety of things to make the cards cooler such as adding larger HSF's and in the case of 3dfx, finally adding active cooling. Nvidia doesn't really have to worry about heat because the GeForce2's generate less heat than their brethren because of the new 0.18-micron process alongside better cooling than previous cards.

If you've been following hardware news lately, you would know that Elsa's Gladiac was without the doubt the first GeForce2 GTS board to enter the mass market. If you cruise around ebay or trading boards, you would know that the Gladiac's in people's possession outnumber any other GeForce2 card. This was because everyone wanted a GF2 and they jumped on the chance when the Gladiac came out weeks before the competition. They debuted at Fry's electronic in the west coast area for around $350. Even with the hefty price tag, they sold out pretty quickly. Before the Gladiac, Elsa has had a very fulfilling relationship with Nvidia. Elsa manufactured cards based on almost every chipset Nvidia created from the pre-TNT days to now the GF2 days. When I received the Gladiac for testing, I first noticed that it wasn't purple as implied in the preview pictures floating around the web. No biggie. Upon closer inspection of the card, I realized that Elsa did not make this card but rather Visiontek. Visiontek also manufactures their own video cards but I was curious why they were making them for Elsa. Then logic set in and I realized that the manufacturing of the Gladiac has been outsourced to other companies to meet customer demands. Heavier demands in this case because of the early introduction of the Gladiac. If you have read our reviews of the Erazor II and III, you would know that we regard Elsa in the highest way. They have made quality products and had extras such as revelator 3d glasses. Now with the Gladiac, Elsa has pushed the bounds of manufacturing by releasing the actual retail board 4 days after Nvidia's initial announcement of the GeForce2 GTS. I can recall my initial surprise of finding a GeForce2 in stock at many Fry's stores a couple of days after the launch. This was because of the miniscule shelf presence of GeForce1 cards after their launch. It is true that products are always on low availability after their launch but Elsa has managed to get enough Gladiacs to meet initial demand an then some. The hefty price tag of $350+ of the Gladiac also helped to keep it in stock =).

In all of the newer Elsa cards, lies support for Elsa's Revelator glasses. Although these glasses do not enhance the quality of gaming much, they are a nice feature to have on any card... especially for bragging rights. Aside from that, The Gladiac also has the GeForce2 GPU, which is undoubtedly the fastest 3D processor available right now for us gamers until the Voodoo5 6000 comes along. The price point the GF2 is at right now is too high for all but the hardcore gamers but I think that when Nvidia announces their new chipset, prices will fall dramatically. The Gladiac has 32MB of DDR SGRAM on board and 64MB models will be available soon. Elsa has no plans to release SDRAM models since the Gladiac is such a high performance board and lower bandwidth memory would only drag down speed at high resolutions. High resolution gameplay was what the GF2 was designed to excel at with it's insanely high 1.6gigatexel fillrate. There looks to be support for additional video features on the card such as Video-In and TV Tuners but none are installed on the board I received. The S-Video out port on the GeForce is not really improved over its predecessors and is the same one found on most of today's cards. This is not a good thing because it is low quality TV-out that doesn't really matter since no one I know uses a TV for playing games. What you do want a TV-out for is DVD playback and with the built-in motion compensation of the Gladiac, DVD's will be smooth as every, especially in scenes with a lot of panning.

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.

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.

Right before we ran our benchmarks, Nvidia released their Detonator 2 drivers that have all of the features of the previously unsupported 5.xx drivers. Since we figured that everyone would upgrade their drivers to Detonator 2's, we thought it necessary for us to test with these new drivers. Like our other reviews, we will run these tests on our 733MHz testbed with the standard Quake III/ 3D Mark 2000 suites.

As you can see in fastest mode, the Gladiac is a winner in all of the resolutions. The Voodoo5 5500 AGP has a lower cap than the Gladiac and X2, which seems to be equal in the lower resolutions. The Voodoo5 surpasses the X2 but doesn't quite catch up to the Gladiac.

Again we see that all of the cards are CPU limited at the lowest resolutions. The Voodoo5 5500 again overtakes the DDR but still doesn't catch up to the Gladiac.

Now here's where the extra 32MB of RAM kicks in for the Voodoo5, it almost comes out to a tie between the Gladiac and the Voodoo5 in the higher resolutions. The Gladiac pulls through defeating all of the other cards without question. The Gladiac is aimed towards high-resolution gameplay and it's very good gratifying to see that Nvidia delivered on its promise of much increased performance over the original DDR.

In Direct3D, the Gladiac again outperforms even the best of the other cards by a very large margin. Not much to say here since none of the other cards come close.

No one can argue that the Gladiac is fast. No one can argue that performance it top notch, and no one can argue that it makes for one of the best gaming experiences you'll ever have. Its performance is proven and it is the fastest video card for consumers available today. It's beyond fast, it's screaming and nothing will touch it for a good couple of months until either 3dfx releases the Voodoo5 6000 or Nvidia releases the NV15. Either way, this card is worth having and it's a good investment. It won't become obsolete anytime soon. Through all of this, the card remained stable and worked fine. As for it's anti-aliasing… AA is becoming more and more important in gaming as players demand quality. We all hate those jaggies don't we? I tried a few games with the D3D AA cranked up to the max but it still did not look as good as 3dfx's 4X FSAA. I'm sure nothing will be able to be as good as 3dfx's for a few months. Until then, Nvidia's AA is not bad at all and should be enough to keep everyone happy. It would be wrong of us to not mention the huge performance hit that we sacrifice for Nvidia's AA whether it be OGL or D3D. Since most of the AA is done in software, it takes CPU cycles and GPU resources to use AA. The hit is so large it even justifies you not using it. At 200/333, this card is a demon but lets see how fast we can actually get it to go.

We mentioned before that Elsa has included an overclocking utility with its drivers. This means either of 2 things. 1) Elsa doesn't care if people burn out their cards or 2) Elsa is confident that their card can please even the most die-hard overclockers. To give it a shot, we left the stock HSF on (although it is puny) and used Powerstrip to see how high it can fly.

There is one key design features that should allow the GF2 GTS cards to overclock well, mainly the 0.18-micron process that the chip was created under. The smaller the architecture the less heat it generates. Lets take a look at the SGRAM on this card, it is the exact same as the ones used in the DDR GeForces, Infineon DDR SGRAM, same latency and all. This distressed us because we could barely get our Erazor X2 memory from 300 to 340 while maintaining stability. The GeForce2 has memory clocked at 333MHz using the same RAM, does this mean we can't get the memory clock much higher? Lets find out.

Overclocking this card was a breeze through the control panels. We went in increments of 5MHz until we reached instability, then we decreased by 1Mhz. We could get our core speed up to 230MHz, which isn't bad at all but not as high as we expected. The memory was a different story; we got ours past 366MHz, which is extraordinary. It's a little strange that we couldn't get our X2 DDR RAM past 340 but we could get up to 366 on the Gladiac using the same memory. The only conclusion I can make is that there were some improvements in the manufacturing process of the RAM. Overall, I think that the Gladiac is on of the more overclockable GTS cards out there but it could have been better with bigger HSF's.

Pros Good availability Great Performance in 3D 6 yr. Warranty Select your own games Good motion compensation in DVD playback

Cons Expensive Unneeded extras in drivers Not as overclockable as hoped and not purple CPU dependent AA

For games today, you will probably need as much horsepower you can get when you want to play at the best levels. But some might not be willing to pay an arm and a leg for 10fps. But there are others that would pay and arm and a leg and their parent's arms and legs for 10fps. These are the guys that the Gladiac caters to, the extreme gamers who want to play the best they can play.

The Gladiac has its perks. It was the first one to get to the market so there was plenty of time for improvements and driver fixes (new one is available at elsa.com). Since it was the first one out, it sold tremendously well and has since been getting good sales. Buying this card is a hefty investment with prices reaching $350 but if you want the absolute fastest card there is, The Gladiac might be one of the fastest. We'll have a few more GTS cards on our meat choppers this month. The extra features the Gladiac has such as the extra software for tweaking your visuals is great for professionals but not really necessary for gamers. What I neglected to mention before but should is the games bundle. There is none but there is something better. When you purchase a Gladiac, Elsa lets you pick your own games (3 of them) for free and lets you purchase others at OEM prices. This is great because I usually don't like the games that come bundled with other boards. Bundle all this with a 6-year warranty and you'll probably have the best combination of features and performance there is. I was very impressed with the Gladiac's 2D performance and ecstatic about the 3D performance. This is one card that I wont be putting down anytime soon. The only bad part is the price =).

Rating: 8.5/10 SystemLogistics