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The ELSA Erazor III ViVo has the most featured TV Out functions I´ve ever seen on a NVIDIA based card.

ERAZOR III ViVo Videoausgabe

You can handle the Video-Out independent of the desktop settings. You can chnage the position and size (it works) but the most impressive thing is the setting of the Video-Out:

Video, Direct3D: Fullscreen display of games or video - independent of the desktop resolution
Virtual Screen: Video-Out at resolutions like 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Video Out at 800x600 with panning (follows mose cursor)
Whole Desktop: Fullscreen TV-out even at resolutions like 1024x768 or 1280x1024. The TV signal is scaled down.
Active window: Shows the actual application window fullscreen (scaled to max) on the TV
Window: A specified application window fullscreen (scaled to max) on TV
Zoom: follows mouse on the desktop but shows this area zoomed on the
Client area: You can choose an area on the desktop that is displayed and zoomed to max on the TV

The mouse cursor is visible on the TV. Other tweaks are color settings for the TV-out.

There are rumors that ELSA will release an ULTRA version of the Erazor III. When and at what clockspeeds is unknown yet. Let´s hope that ELSA does not target the OEM market with that ULTRA version and we´ll see good cooling and high clockrates (In OEM they count every penny). Maybe we´ll see a change of the 140MHz memoryclockrates - the Synergy II is running at 125/150MHz. The Erazor III I´ve tested is a pre-release. But I have no offical comment on that yet.

GA-Source made an article about the Creative Labs Unified Driver, which allows GLIDE games to run on a Creative TNT card. This works pretty well as you can see on the RIVA Station screenshots.

Isn't this illegal? Actually, there is a legal way. This is called "reverse engineering". When IBM controlled the PC market, much like Apple controls the Macintosh market, Compaq had reverse engineered IBM's PC BIOS and thus made their motherboard designs and entered the PC market. Creative, if they developed the drivers with this process, are invincible from 3dfx's lawyers.

Jim Carlton, the Senior Brand manager for Graphics and video products at Creative, offered us this statement:

We have taken many steps to ensure that Unified does not infringe on 3Dfx's or any other company's IP (intellectual property). We have carefully tailored our work so that it is consistent with what is permissible in achieving compatibility with an existing standard. Our code base is entirely our own.

As expected, 3dfx Interactive chose to ignore this article and our requests for a response.

GA-Source reviewed the Hercules Dynamite ULTRA TNT2:

So what do you get if you purchase the Hercules Dynamite Ultra TNT/2? You get what is so far the fastest TNT/2 card, which puts you into the 1024x768 and over resolution on most games, while retaining good framerates. I think that although the G400 MAX may outperform it at higher resolutions (and possibly 32 bit color), the Dynamite gives you over 50 frames per second in Unreal at 1024x768 (while the G400 MAX doesn't quite hit 40). This does lead me back to the concept of watching benchmarks closely.

Read the whole review here.

Brain Hook made an update of his .plan-file. He shows some new benchmark results of Quake3:

TNT2 didn't take top honors in many of the fields, just the 640x480x32bpp numbers, however it has the distinction of being very close to the top in nearly all tests, so it's probably the best all around board if you care about high res and 32bpp. TNT still is putting a way respectable showing, and I've seen those Creative TNT boards now for as low as $79. That is as close to a no-brainer as I've seen in a long time.

We received some TNT2 Ultra boards, but I couldn't get them to work. When those fire up for us I'll post the numbers, and maybe the landscape will change.

The results in an overview table can be read here.

Comment: The results are a bit strange. A S3 Savage4 on the front? The card performs faster than a TNT but the performance is way below a TNT2.... id-Software should release a patch for the Q3Tests which let everybody run correct timedemo runs with Quake3. I´m also wondering about the problems of BH with TNT2 ULTRA cards. There is no difference in the installation of a TNT2 ULTRA, TNT2 or a TNT. I can only advice you to read these results carefully.

Viper 3D hat made a review of the ASUS AGP-V3800TVR:

In summary my experiences so far have been quite good with better performance over the old Creative TNT that I had. I would like to see new ASUS drivers ASAP so I can fully use their great utilities. When I get hold of a video camera I will be posting shots (using the TV In) of the card etc.

REad the whole article here.

Robin sneds mail that some guys called DrivHIGH are developing thier own new drivers for graphic cards. For RIVA cards they have a RIVA 128 driver which shall be faster than original drivers.

DrivHIGH is about bringing you better performance from the hardware you already own without damaging the board with overclocking. We have 3 programmers and 1 webmaster. We are trying to get some press on sites like VoodooExtreme and planetriva and others. All drivers are for Windows 9x, sorry no NT.

I´m not Voodooexteme... but better than nothing ;-) I did´nt test the drivers yet.
Update: I got a mail from Stuard who told me that only the files nv3tweak.dll, nv3qtwk.dll, nv3disp.inf and nv3tweak.inf have been modified! This are only some files for the tweak menu. You should be very carefull if you want to try these drivers!

The ELSA 3D Revelator shutter glasses currently only work in Direct 3D. OpenGL games like Quake & co can´t be used at this time. But you can use Scitech´s GLDirect wrapper software to translate OpenGL to Direct 3D. So you can play Quake3 in real 3D using Direct 3D:

The screenshot above shows the DynaZ menu of the ELSA Revelator Software (To show that it works - You can´t see the 3D shifting effect here because you can´t make screenshot from front- and backbuffer of the graphics card at the same time - would neet to make a photo from the screen to show that). It´s very nice to Quake in 3D but the quality and speed is a lot lower than with the original NVIDIA OpenGL driver! Quake2 looks pretty good but the image quality in Quake3 Tests is worse. You get much better quality in Q3 when you disable the OpenGL extensions but the performance is rather bad. GLDirect is shareware an can be used for 21 days.

I got the ELSA Erazor III with RIVA TNT2 and the ELSA Winner II with S3 Savage4 Pro today, garnished with the 3D shutter glasses ELSA 3D Revelator.

Erazor III ViVo 32MB - TNT2

ELSA Erazor III

The ELSA Erazor III VIVO is equiped with 32MB SDRAM (7ns - SEC) that is seperatet in only 4 memory modules. The card is quiped with Video IN and OUT. The connectors are placed on an adapter cable that is allready known from the Erazor (RIVA 128). A Brooktree Bt869KRF is responsible for TV-Out. For Video In you have an ITT VPX 322SD. The TNT2 is cooled by an passive cooling element (glued). I´ll take a closer look on the features now and will post some benchmark results soon.

ELSA Winner II - Savage4 PRO

ELSA Winner II

A S3 Savage4 pro is working on the ELSA Winner II. The card is working at 143MHz Chip and Memclock and equiped with 16MB SGRAM (SEC 7ns). Benchmark results coming soon.

ELSA 3D Revelator

3D Revelator

The shutter glasses ELSA 3D Revelator are available in a cable and Infrared version. You can get a real 3D impression on your PC with them. You canuse them with the following ELSA graphic cards: Erazor II & III, Victory II and Winner II. You can see very nice details on a first look. The glasses come in a nice fabric spectacle-case (both, cable and IR version). You can fix the IR emitter of the IR version with a stripe of tape on your monitor. The tape is removable multiple times (don´t know the word 'Klett' in english <erks>). The cable of the emitter has a length of more than 2meters. That should be enough in all cases.
My first impression of the glasses with 3DMARK99MAX demo: WOW! THIS ROCKS! - How shall I describe that in a review!?

You now can play Glide games on Creative TNT cards with the Creative Unified Driver. But this driver does also work on other TNT (2) cards. In the following some Wing Commander Secret Operations screenshots in Glide mode. They were made with an ASUS V3800 Deluxe TNT2 ULTRA with NVIDIA drivers v1.81:

Videosetup of WC Prophecy



TNT2 / Glide Screenshots

You can find the Unified Driver here. You need to have a serial number of a Creative card to download it.

Update 18.05: These drivers are BETA and do not work in every game. WC works fine but most games do not. These drivers are also no grahic card drivers. You install them beside your existing card drivers. They currently only support Glide 2.X. But not all blend-modes are implemented yet. This results in missing textures etc.



TNT2 / Glide Screenshots

You can see many objects without textures in these Starsiege and Turok shots. This drivers is not a 'must-have' at the moment - it´s a public beta-test. I think the shipping of the new Creative Graphics Blaster TNT2 is also a reason for this test.... A first final version of the unified driver is announced to end of june. More about that can be found in the Unified-FAQ.
If you want to know more about Glide and Glide wrappers (The CL is not the first and only one...) should take a look on the website Glideunderground.... and please don´t ask me for serials!

Gamecenter made an Interview with id´s programmer John Carmak. There was also the question for the fastest graphics card today:

GC: Who makes the fastest 3D card today?

J. C.: The fastest 3D card today is the [RIVA] TNT 2. I don't think anybody will even question that. You'd be hard-pressed to find an ATI or a 3dfx engineer who, if you really got them into a corner, wouldn't admit that.

...new ammunition for new endless discussions ;-) Check out the whole thing here.

The Tomshardware Quake3 results made with different graphic cards are not correct at all. The reason for this is that the lag that occurs after the start of the timedemo influences the results. There´s an interresting article about that at RIVA 3D. Tom made a statement about this stuff. Q3Test Timedemo at Tomshardware

Comment: I can´t understand the dirty war on the web against Tom. We all are human and if you find out things noone else wrote about before you always have the danger that it might be wrong. That´s live!