|
The
Erazor III
OK, this is
standard issue for the TNT2 with all its great features. The clock
rate on the card was set 125 MHz. core and 140 Memory Clock. This is
a TNT2 standard card. I believe Elsa will have a TNT2 Ultra as well
shortly. The card is laid out very well and the design is clean. The
2D Image quality that the board puts out under its own drivers in
Win98 is excellent, a credit to Elsa's clean design. The board above
shows an LCD Output Connector on it. The actual board we got looks
like this...
Click
Image
This is the
board with just VGA output and 32MB of SDRAM . Ours came with -G7
Samsung SDRAM to be specific. These look like 64Mbit chips. 4 of
them make a total of 256 Megabits or 32 Megabytes ! There, that is
the conclusion of Memory 101 from Hot Hardware. Remember 8 bits in a
byte! :-)
The heatsink on
the unit provides adequate cooling. It is a nice fine pitch pin-fin
style. We added a little 486 fan for some added cooling. This will
void your warranty but we were living on the edge a little. Here's
the board after our slight modification...
with
this set up we achieved 140 MHz. core clock and 145 MHz. memory
clock speeds
and
here is a shot of Elsa's Drivers for the card...
The drivers are
very tweakable and easy to use. There is also a system tray icon
that you can load to set the display on the fly. We downloaded the
latest version dated June 9th. for our testing.
The
Revelator Glasses
Once
again, the above image is not quite what we received for testing. We
received the "tethered" or wired model. The shot above is
of the IR or wireless model. We hope to be testing one of these
babies soon. The wired models work the same but obviously won't give
you the same freedom as the wireless pair. Both glasses work on a
shutter technology. That is to say that they present your eyeball
with an image on one side that is slightly askew from the image your
other eye will see a split second later. The image is actually
offset from the other shutters image about enough to compensate for
the distance between your eyes. As one image is presented to your
left eye, the other shutter is blacking out the image on the other
eye. This all happens at a very high refresh rate preferably 100 Hz
or higher. The higher the better. This means you need a good monitor
with high refresh rates to look at while viewing through these
glasses.
We
tested the glasses on a Sony Trinitron 400PS 19" Monitor at
1024X768 at 100 Hz. This was actually high enough to provide good 3D
viewing for over 1/2 hour without too much eye fatigue. We did
mention that you look through these glasses at your monitor, right?
Remember the good ol' days of the green and red 3D Movies? Say hello
again to the Creature from The Black Lagoon! It brought back
memories! In any event, for our younger crowd here, let's just say
they work the same way as those old movie type 3D Glasses only they
are LCDs and block the image totally from your site during a screen
refresh.
All
in all, the effect was absolutely fantastic! The 3D effect these
bring on will blow your mind. Today's 3D Accelerators give you the
effect on a 2 dimensional plane. These glasses give you the sense
that your could jump right in a join the action, something we were
glad was not reality while testing them on Unreal! By the way,
remember, these glasses work on D3D titles only now. This is a very
large percentage of games, so you should get plenty of use out of
them.
Here's
a shot of the drivers tab for the Revelators ... Click please...
As
you can see there are various presets for configuring the glasses to
various games for optimum viewing. This basically compensates and
adjusts the settings to the game's unique look and feel. The
settings add the appropriate amount of depth to each game's images.
Once again, the drivers and the general operation of the 3D Glasses
were flawless. Some games looked better than others but most looked
great. The affect with First Person Shooter games is stunning. As
noted, we tested Unreal and then fired up Half Life. Both games
support Direct 3D. What a rush!
| 
