nVIDIA recently released the latest card in their so far extremely fast Geforce line of cards – the Geforce 3, and I am fortunate enough to be one of the first in Europe to receive the Elsa version – the Gladiac 920. So what does this card have to offer over the already awesome Geforce 2 Ultra and ATi Radeon cards? Plenty is the answer… It is much more than just a slightly tweaked Geforce 1 like the GTS was. This is largely thanks to its nFinite FX engine - a fully programmable effect processor.
The box
Inside the Gladiac box, in addition to the card itself, you will also find a TV-out lead, a Driver CD, DVD decoder software, comprehensive installation instructions and best of all a full version of the game Giants: Citizen Kabuto - complete with Geforce 3 optimisations. In my opinion this isn’t the greatest game ever made, but it is certainly rare to find a complete title bundled with a video card these days, so top marks to Elsa for doing this.
The Card
The card itself is a typical green PCB affair, but looks rather snazzy thanks to its colourful green ramsinks and stylish heatsink-fan. It is more fully featured than some other Geforce 3 cards out there since it has a TV-out port in addition to the standard monitor port. The memory is clocked at 230 MHz DDR (460MHz effectively) whilst the core is clocked at 200MHz. At 57 million transistors – more than double the Geforce 2 Ultra’s, the Geforce 3 is even more complex than the most sophisticated processor on the market, the Intel Pentium 4. So what on earth has nVIDIA been doing to utilise all this transistor space? Well quite a lot actually…
