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Elsa
Gladiac 921DVI GeForce3 Ti500
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Author : Wayne
Date : 30th December 2001
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3DVelocity would like to
thank Elsa
for their help and courtesy in providing this graphics card
for review.
Benchmarks
DroneZ Mark :
I ran this benchmark using the "Generic
High Quality" setting to maintain compatibility with future
tests run on other cards. The Elsa results are in bold!
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Minimum
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Maximum
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Average
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| FPS |
56.55 |
56.91 |
340.85 |
343.44 |
127.86 |
128.1 |
| T+L
K Triangles |
14.35 |
14.72 |
3431.62 |
3466.88 |
1874.39 |
1876.22 |
| OpenGL
K Triangles |
13.59 |
13.66 |
3431.27 |
3465.12 |
1855.81 |
1859.4 |
Yet again we see Elsa scrape a victory by the
skin of its teeth. I challenge anyone to notice the difference
between the two cards in real world use but as a purely academic
observation Elsa do seem to by ahead by a nose.
Quake3 Arena TimeDemo 001:
I ran the Quake3 Arena TimeDemo 001 at various
resolutions using the max quality settings.
Although an extra 3FPS at 800x600 is unlike to
help your frag rate when you're already running at over 190FPS,
it does again support the theory that the Elsa card is optimised
ahead of the Creative card. This could be nothing more than
a better batch of memory but with the cards so close in results
it at least gives me something to talk about!
VillageMark
VillageMark is designed to test a graphics card's
ability to handle overdraw (hidden surface removal). A flying
camera pans around a village rendered in large (up to 1024x1024)
high quality textures. The fact that they are constantly appearing
and being hidden as the camera pans makes heavy use of your
GPU's ability to effectively discard unwanted data before it's
rendered then dumped.
1024x768x32bpp
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Creative 3D
Blaster
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Elsa Gladiac
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74FPS
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75FPS
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Again within the margin for error, both cards
did an admirable job of dealing with heavy overdraw scenario,
though not quite to Radeon 8500 standards.
NBench :
I usually go and put the kettle on while this
one's running. It does exactly what a benchmark should but the
dated graphics and naff looking camera pans and object motion
make it a painful experience.
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Creative 3D
Blaster
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Elsa Gladiac
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8088
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8094
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Another slight but barely perceptible win for
Elsa. This is likely to be an increasing problem for manufacturers
basing their cards on NVIDIA's reference design. While doing
this does mean they release a product based on a tried and tested
layout, it also means it's that much harder to differentiate
your product from your competitor's. Of course price, overclockability
and bundle will feature in the final decision, but the weighting
you attach to each of these areas is something that will vary
from buyer to buyer.
Talking about overclocking, let's see how the
921DVI shaped up.
Page 10 - Overclocking
