|
 |
| Benching
the Gladiac |
| The
fastest frame rates money can buy
right now, except for FSAA |
|
Now
that you've seen the Direct 3D and Digital Video
performance of the Gladiac, let's see what impact
FSAA has on the card in Quake3 Arena. Again,
personally I would love to be able to show scores
in a wider variety of actual game play but no game
on the market today even comes close to Quake 3 on
measuring OpenGL performance with repeatability
and accuracy.
Again,
with the exception of 640X480 resolution, in 32
bit color, the GeForce2 GTS is not
"playable". If you are willing to
drop back to 16 bit mode, things are pretty smooth
even at 1024X768. We have heard reports of
the ability to scale back to different levels of
FSAA in OpenGL with the GeForce2. However,
the neither the NVidia reference drivers nor the
Elsa drivers support this out of the box for the
end user. Again, the hardware definitely has
the power, NVidia needs to improve on the software
side of things for FSAA to really perform the way
it should.
Let's
turn up the frame rates a bit and turn off FSAA.
Here again, we are testing on the P3-866 with Max
Texture resolution.
In a
word, WOW. There is no question that the
GeForce2 GTS is the frame rate leader in the
market today. The Gladiac shows strong
scores across the board.
So,
let's see what a little overclocking can do for
the numbers.
Perfectly
stable throughout all of our tests, the Gladiac
posted over 85 frames per second at 1024X768 in 32
bit color. You just can't beat that with
technology that is on the market today. Very
nice indeed.
So
what impact will this have on our FSAA
numbers? Let's have a look.
Still
not quite there yet but getting closer. The
1024X768 16 bit color frame rate is darn good and
looked pretty snazzy as well.
Finally,
many of you folks out there are probably not
running a system with a 866MHz. Pentium and RAMBUS
memory. So here is a look at performance
numbers NOT overclocked on our P3-600 BX chipset
test bed.
Once
again, these are the fastest scores in Quake 3, we
have ever produced on a Pentium 3 at 600MHz.
If you are still using a TNT2 or Voodoo 2,
upgrading to a Gladiac will provide better
performance improvements than even a 200+ MHz.
processor upgrade would yield. We have no
compaints, with respect to these scores on our
mainstream test setup.
The
NVidia GeForce2 GTS powered Elsa Gladiac showed
up, here at Hot Hardware, ready to play. We
were very impressed by the raw horsepower of this
card and the quality with which it was
built. We can say with confidence that the
stability and compatibility with the Gladiac is
excellent as well as the potential for even better
performance with its overclocking prowess.
On the downside, although FSAA is being marketed
as a feature, the NVidia approach is not fully
mature yet, at least in our eyes.
We
have seen the Gladiac retail on line for around
$325. It seems as if all of the latest
rounds of graphics cards are being released in
this $300-ish price bracket. Comparatively,
the Gladiac delivers good bang for your
buck. It just depends on what your budget
may allow for a new graphics card. With
memory prices going up along with the density that
is available on these cards, higher prices were
inevitable by comparison to cards of yesterday
with 16MB of slower SDRAM.
All
things considered, the Elsa Gladiac is a top end
performer that will provide a significant
improvement in your overall gaming and multi-media
experience. As we noted, you can't buy
faster overall frame rates right now. With
that in mind, we tip our hats to Elsa and NVidia
for a providing such an impressive
combination.
| 
