Elsa has released their Erazor X² GeForce DDR video card, and now that we've had a chance to run it through some tests we'll have a look at how it compares to a GeForce SDR and a TNT2 Ultra. Elsa, a company based in Germany, also makes the Erazor III TNT2, as well as the 3D REVELATOR glasses. Out Erazor X² didn't come with a 3D REVELATOR, but we hope to have a look these LCD shutter glasses soon.

Fig. 1 Elsa Erazor X² GeForce DDR

There have been many companies coming out of the woodwork to jump on the GeForce train, and most of the DDR (double data rate) ram equipped GeForce boards we have looked at have been very close to each other in performance. The question for combat simulation gamers is "how much better is this performance than my current video card." COMBATSIM.COM is currently working on a video card round up of all the major NVIDIA and 3dfx cards, and we will soon answer that question. Until then we'll have a look at how the Elsa Erazor X² compares to a couple of its NVIDIA relatives.

We put the Elsa card up against a Creative Labs Annihilator SDR and a Creative TNT2 Ultra. There are 3.75 beta drivers floating around the Internet at the moment, but in the interests of consistent testing we used the current 3.68 reference drivers offered at NVIDIA's home page for all three cards. We ran the the Elsa and Creative cards through 3Dmark2000's battery of tests, as well as the same four games we used in our review of Diamond's Viper II. We were going to include the Viper II in this comparison, however the new beta drivers that were released a week after our review made the problems we had with the Viper worse instead of better.

We used the FRAPS frames per second (FPS) measuring utility in all the games tested instead of the FPS utility integral to the games. This was done to ensure consistency in the FPS data. Each simulation tested was also patched to its current version, including Falcon 4.0, where the 1.08i2 patch courtesy of iBeta was used. Since there are no timedemo style tests for us combat simulation types, we used specific missions with specific flight path marker positions to evaluate the tested video cards in each sim. We also flew each mission for a couple minutes and took note of any drastic changes in frames per second. The only instance of this occurring was with Flanker 2, when certain pitch attitudes below the horizon would cause the FPS performance to increase drastically, however this happened with each card. We avoided pointing the nose at the sky, as it tends to max out the FRAPS counter, giving inconclusive results.

• NVIDIA GeForce 256 GPU
• 256 - Bit QuadPipe Rendering engine
• Integrated Transmission and Lighting
• AGP 4X/2X Modes
• Active cooling fan with ELSA ChipGuard
• 32MB of 6ns DDR Ram
• 3D REVELATOR Ready
• S-video TV out
• DVD and HDTV ready
• 350 MHz RAMDAC

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Below is a list of each of the simulations used in testing, as well as their respective missions and settings.