Introduction

Website found buried beneath video cards

Is it ever going to stop? It all started out as a little trickle back in August last year when NVIDIA announced its new GeForce 256 graphics processor. A couple SDR and DDR GeForce 256 reference cards arrived at the office a few months later, and FS staffers rejoiced. We always like seeing new hardware.

Toy soldiers

Smile!

Then came the deluge. The GeForce 256 was just the first step. Little did we know that NVIDIA had plans to conquer the world. As may already know, ATI and Matrox are both vertical graphics companies that control everything from chip design to board manufacture. When 3dfx and S3 also went vertical by buying board manufacturers STB and Diamond respectively, NVIDIA became the only source for graphics chips in town. All the third party video board manufacturers such as Creative Labs and ELSA could only turn to NVIDIA for chips.

This meant that we would only see a handful of products from 3dfx, ATI, S3 and Matrox each generation, and just about every other video card out there would feature an NVIDIA chip. Guillemot/Hercules, ELSA, Creative Labs, Leadtek, ASUS, Abit, and AOpen all make NVIDIA GeForce based products, and they all wanted to send us cards to review since they heard that we do that kind of stuff over here.

It's been over a year, and I think it's safe to say that we've seen just about everything. 32MB SDR, DDR, 64MB, GeForce 256, GeForce 2 GTS, GeForce 2 MX, you name it. We've even had several Detonator driver reports just because so many of our readers have NVIDIA cards.

Check out the reflections

More marching

Tired yet?

You'd think that we might be sick of seeing all these NVIDIA cards (which is partially true), but we still love testing new hardware. Today we have the ELSA GLADIAC ULTRA, one the first and only GeForce 2 Ultra cards on the market.

Although we would have preferred an NV20, the Ultra is enough to tide us over for a couple more months. We still don't know when the NV20 is going to be ready and NVIDIA doesn't officially comment on unannounced products.

Lets take a look at ELSA's latest and greatest. By the way, we also did a little extra T&L testing just to spice things up.