Elsa And The Driver Problems

If you look for reference drivers for the Quadro chip on Nvidia's homepage , your search will be in vain. There you only find drivers for the Riva, TNT and GeForce chips. Nvidia refuses any support and points directly to Elsa for Quadro drivers. However, if you look at the INF entries of the GeForce drivers, you discover that GeForce drivers also work with the Quadro. This really is no surprise because the GeForce and Quadro chip cores are almost identical. But before we compare the Elsa Gloria II with all the other cards, we wanted to know whether the Nvidia reference drivers are better than the Elsa drivers. This caused us a lot of headaches, but the good news first: We started the test with the dedicated Elsa MAXTREME driver for the 3D Studio.

Hats off to the engineers at Elsa. They did very good work. In a series of tests the MAXTREME driver more than doubled the performance. The reference driver from Nvidia can only keep up in the Texture3.Max test. In this figure you also see the results from the GeForce chips.