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Who with a Elsa Gladiac can proof that it has better 2D than the rest?

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jaypatel, it is not the manufacturers fault. it is the reference design. Ramdacs are built into the chip now. If you look on older boards such as a old matrox 2 a ramdac is quite a large chip, but they are integrated into the core of the chips now. RFI filters, cannot be made that crappy, the cost of the stuff that a RFI filter is made of is neglible. Really following a reference design is easy. It is just a program that is given to the manufacturing lines to make the boards.

All boards are made with data that is put in a machine to tell the machines where to etch traces etc. That is how you get asus and soyo motherboard being pirated, someone steals the files that hold the designs and just loads them into their own pcb machines. This isn't rocket science, the nvidia reference design files are probably just given to the manufacturers to use, and some just use them as is, and in theory it should be all great, but its not since the design has got to have a flaw somewhere making the 2d look like crap. As the arcitles about RFI filters have said, an RFI filter kills the video bandwith. A well designed RFI filter would do this very well, and thus kill the 2d even more since it would kill the video bandwith veryeffectively. A board with a shoddy RFI filter, would have more video bandwith since more RFI emissions would leak , and you would actually in theory get a better display with a crummy RFI filter.

Also manufacturer who make the reference boards, are usually creative labs or visiontek, and even those look like crap. The reference design is not right, hopefully the infusion of 3dfx talent there will fix it in future designs, especially should any of the gigapixel designed chips ever see the light of day . Even the old ati boards that were made by 3rd parties (some ragepro, rage 2 and rage128vr boards) looked better than most of the geforce2's out there
 
i've used the NVidia OEM GeForce2, Voodoo4 4500, Elsa Gladiac GF2(which i'm using now) and the Radeon 64 VIVO. A high res the radeon is a lot better but for gaming in win2k with radeon kinda blows compared to the GF2. Elsa Gladiac's 2D i guess is a little better than the Creative OEM made board and the Voodoo4 4500 is about on par with the Gladiac i guess. I'm using a Sony trinitron monitor, hope my experience helps. but at 16000x1200 the radeon 2D is noticably clearer and sharper
 
The blurriness can be a problem for pixel-by-pixel graphic editing unless you zoom all the way in, it can appear that pixels surrounding a certain color will "wash over" sort of like a TV. This gets annoying and somewhat painful to the eyes, especially after using a Matrox card. I didn't think the blurriness would be apparent at below 12x10 resolution, but I can tell you that this Visiontek GTS is blurring at 10x7*85hz. It can't be my monitor, because I've swapped various vid cards out of curiosity if my eyes were deceiving me. Sure enough, the Visiontek sucks at displaying 2D. God forbid if I get a 19" monitor down the line and use a higher resolution!

OTOH if you're a very avid gamer, you will not notice the difference. It's the people who do work on the same computer as gaming that will have to worry about the GTS' 2D. Whichever card you get, I hope it works great for you Ndee 🙂
 
PilotronX:
Thanx. My BW-fella 😉

The other question is: When I had to upgrade the Radeon for 3D performance, I would also needed to upgrade the GTS, or is the performance of a GTS really that much faster?

Damn, it's a pretty tough desicision. Today, I jump on the Radeon train, tomorrow, I'll jump on the GTS train. But I think I'll stick with the GTS, cuz I only have a 17" and don't plan to upgrade in near future.

Thanx for all the input.
 
I have an elsa gladiac and Starcraft and other games run fine and look nice too. I dont see how much better can 2D games look. Enlight me...
 
Be warned.
The newer Elsa GF2 GTS cards are NOT made by Visiontek any longer, but now come from Hungery. Comparing these new cards to the Visiontek (Made in the USA) card shows huge differences in construction quality. I had both and dumped the Elsa just from the way it was built. Retail Elsa purchased at buy.com about 1 month ago.
 
2D games running at 640x480 are hardly a test of how good your 2D quality is. :|

I'm sure you don't use Starcraft to write on this forum, do you? 😉
You don't use Master of Orion II to write out a book report due the next day...

2D is important when you WORK, often with text. Fuzzy text is hard on the eyes....
 
Holy Banana, not all of us can play games all the time on our systems, some of us have to do work

BLAH!!! 🙁

that's when the nvidia card gets annoying
 
I never had any problems with the 2d on my 32mb Elsa Gladiac video card. It looked better than the 2d on my old Iomagic 32mb TNT2 M64 card. I have not really noticed a difference between the 2d quality of my Gladiac and my current 32mb ATI AIW Radeon.

Even though I did do the rfi filter mod on my GTS, it was only, because I also did the Quadro 2 Pro mod and since I already had the soldering iron out, I figured why not do both.🙂

I'm only ran the GTS at 1280x1024x32bpp @85hz on my 19" FD Trinitron monitor. That's what I'm running my AIW Radeon at, too.
 
WHEN WILL PEOPLE GET IT RIGHT

The 2D probs on the GeForce cards ONLY pertains to the Aperature Grille monitors.
The shadowmask monitors combined with any nvidia card has excellent 2D.

I design graphics the majority of time, and I can assure you, I can't stand a card with bad 2D.
I've owned all 3 generations of Voodoo's.. good quality there.
I work on Matrox G450's at school all day long.. good quality there as well.

My GeForce2 (creative) looks dandy with my Samsung SyncMaster Shadowmask monitor.

mmmmmkay.
 


<< The 2D probs on the GeForce cards ONLY pertains to the Aperature Grille monitors. The shadowmask monitors combined with any nvidia card has excellent 2D. >>



I agree. The text was a lot sharper on my old 17-inch shadowmask compared to my newer FD Triniton monitor. I thought maybe it was my monitor, since it's a cheap KDS Avitron.
 


<< I've owned all 3 generations of Voodoo's.. good quality there. >>



All...3? Even in just 2D, you have the Voodoo Rush, Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo3, Voodoo4/5.

In any case, the Voodoo3 2000 PCI I have doesn't compare favorably to my Radeon AIW, although you can't tell that without comparing them, or at least I can't.

I've never owned, touched, or seen an NVIDIA card, so I can't comment on their quality, but I love my Radeon.
 
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