The Elsa Gladiac 64MB DDR GeForce 2 GTS
You Do Play Games, Right?

By Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta
9/24/00

To say the video card market is saturated with GeForce 2 powered video cards right now would be an understatement.  With nVidia being the last of the major chip vendors, they are the only real option for companies like Elsa, Creative Labs and others if they want to compete in the hot 3D card arena.  With multiple companies trying to compete against each other with essentially the same product, deciding which one to spend your hard earned money on is tough. 

Today we’re taking a look at Elsa’s offering in the 64MB GeForce market, the Gladiac 64.  This isn’t one of the hot new GeForce 2 Ultras that are about to hit the market, but it is definitely not a slouch in the performance department.  However, the performance of the card is its only defining factor.    You won’t find too many “bells and whistles” here…

         

Specifications Of The Elsa Gladiac 64MB DDR
It's a reference design, but who cares?!?

  • NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS GPU
  • High-Performance DDR memory
  • AGP 4X with Fast Writes
  • 32-bit color ARGB with destination alpha
  • Cube environment mapping and Anisotropic texture filtering
  • Optimized Direct3D and OpenGL acceleration
  • Complete DirectX 7, DirectX 6 and DirectX 5 support
  • Advanced support for DirectDraw
  • Hardware color space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
  • 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering
  • 8:1 upscaling and downscaling
  • Per-pixel color keying
  • Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering
  • DVD sub-picture alpha blended compositing
  • Video acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-1, MPEG-2,and Indeo
  • RAMDAC/Pixel Cycle: 350 MHz
  • Memory: 32MB or 64MB DDR RAM
  • Bus Systems: AGP 2x/4x (including fast writes and execute mode) or PCI
  • Standards: DPMS, DDC2B, Plug & Play
  • Optional Video Module: 1x Video-In & 1x Video-Out
  • BIOS: VESA BIOS 3.0 support
  • API Support: DirectX 6, DirectX 7, OpenGL
  • Internal/Memory Interface Clock: 200MHz/166MHz
  • Horizontal SYNC Signals: 31.5Hz - 108.5Hz
  • Vertical Refresh Rate: 60Hz - 200Hz

The specification list reads like any other GeForce 2 based reference design but there’s got to be something to make this card stand out, right?  There sure is!  We’ll get to that a little later! 

The memory that came installed on the Gladiac 64 is some high quality Hyundai 6NS DDR RAM.

Besides the amount of memory, you’ll also notice that 64MB GeForce 2’s come equipped with DDR SDRAM as opposed to the SGRAM installed on just about all 32MB models.  SGRAM offers slightly higher performance at similar clock speeds to SDRAM, so in some situations the 32MB GeForce 2s will actually outperform their 64MB counterparts.  64MB SGRAM variations would be ideal but at the present time it is cost prohibitive.

Installation, Drivers, Visuals