By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.207.103) on Tuesday, November 27, 2001 - 03:58 pm:

For a long time, Elsa have been modifying nVidea graphics boards for the CAD market. They're excellent boards, but they have not been available for the Mac.

A reliable source from one of the above companies tells me that Elsa have sent a team of engineers to work at nVidea, to develop a new 3D board, to be released soon.

nVidea will supply a team of Mac engineers to bring this "high-end" board to the Mac.

This new board will be released at the MacWorld expo in San Francisco, which is held between January 8-11, 2002... not that far away!

I'm told that the board won't be marketed under the Elsa brand name, despite the fact that Elsa did much of the development of it. It will be branded nVidea, and should be available via the Apple store by mid-January.

By Stephen Enggass (Enggass) (206.26.225.35) on Tuesday, November 27, 2001 - 04:26 pm:

Probably be for 4xAGP systems only...
I wish soomeone would develope a Card for us early G42xAGP users... Ah well...
Steve E

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.202.94) on Tuesday, November 27, 2001 - 08:45 pm:

The upcoming release of a "high-end" 3D board at Macworld SF has been confirmed. This will be an enormous step forward for the Mac 3D community.

I have more information about why it won't be branded "Elsa". The Elsa company would love to release a Mac 3D board, but are being prevented from doing so for legal reasons. They have a contract with nVidia which "restricts them to the dark side" of Windows.

By Nik Mills (Nikmills) (213.99.167.137) on Wednesday, November 28, 2001 - 08:56 am:

How will this be better than the gforce3 we have now?

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.216.46) on Wednesday, November 28, 2001 - 02:59 pm:

The gforce 3 is designed primarily for game players, even though it works quite well for digital content creators.

The new board coming out in January will be a designed specifically for CAD and DCC.

By Nik Mills (Nikmills) (213.99.163.203) on Thursday, November 29, 2001 - 03:53 am:

Okay, I did know that the Gforce3 was a "game board" and that because of that it would render fast and not be "a bottleneck". So I got it and it seems great. I'm really interested in this hardware stuff. What will the difference be? Is the Gforce quick and dirty rendering for games and the new board more refined somehow? What will we see on our screens that's different?

By Mike Stening (Mike_Stening) (213.235.9.84) on Thursday, November 29, 2001 - 04:31 am:

ah but will the new board work ok with games too, hey i like to have fun sometimes too.

By Ed Mag (Ed_M) (64.12.105.151) on Friday, November 30, 2001 - 05:05 pm:

Hello all, I found this little discussion over at another board to be quite interesting. I figured that I'd post the URL here in case any of you are interested. The reader seems to have done their homework. Please take a look. The post can be found here:

http://forums.maccentral.com/wwwthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news011109mayaphp&Number=34341&page=&view=expanded&sb=5&o=&part=&returnto=http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0111/09.maya.php

The post to look for is entered by:

kalico
(stranger)
11/09/01 12:02 PM   
   

original article: http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0111/09.maya.php

Pay particular attention to this part:



[[[Okay, so where does the Mac come into this story? Well, with the ELSA Gloria III. This board competes very well with FireGL and Wildcat 5110, here's a link to a review from Tom's Hardware: http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q2/010615/index.html. The Gloria III board has a nVidia chip called Quadro Pro 2. Now, I started looking around the web for what made the Quadro Pro 2 different from nVidia's GeForce2 line? And I came across this site: http://www.nvworld.ru/docs/sqe.html which not only explains what makes them the SAME (or different depending on your point of view), but also how, on the PC, you can trick a "cheap" GeForce into thinking it's an expensive Quadro. Again you might be asking, why does this matter, as far as the Mac is concerned? Well, after reading about the differences it's obvious that it's all software and not hardware!

This is a very important point,

** THE SPEED GAIN OF THE QUADRO2 PRO (ELSA Gloria III) OVER THE GEFORCE2 GTS IS DONE IN THE SOFTWARE DRIVER.** ]]]  



Best regards,

Ed M.

PS also check out this article:

http://www.architosh.com/news/2001-11/2001a-1130-appleg5.phtml

and feel free to contact me at EdsLab2@aol.com

Architosh is a pretty good site for Mac 3D info...

By Kevin F Stubbs (Kevinfstubbs) (62.255.32.5) on Friday, November 30, 2001 - 05:54 pm:

The Quadro vs GeForce chipset info can also be found lurking on several threads throughout these forums. Just do a search on Quadro, Gloria, SoftQuadro or even Riva Tuner. To put it briefly, at least as far as the PC versions of these cards are concerned, the only real difference between the supposedly high-end professional Quadro based cards and their game-card, regular GeForce equivalents is the price you are asked to pay It sounds like they are trying to continue this arrangement on the Mac plaform.