Review by: Mark Van Buren

The ELSA Gloria ™ DCC card is a professional level solution for digital content creators - hence the DCC acronym.

Included with the card is Elsa's MAXtreme™ driver for Windows 2000 and NT4, opening the door for the creation of some pretty amazing special effects inside of 3ds max ™ 4. Rendering of realistic volumetric fog, particle effects, matrix palette skinning, morphing, animated water surfaces, and reflective bump mapping is now possible real-time inside Max. There is no doubt this will substantially increase your productivity, virtually eliminating your need to render your animations, until you are ready to see your final result.

The card is built using the NVIDIA® Quadro DCC™ graphics processor, which is based on the same architecture inside Microsoft's XBox, and Nvidia's popular leading gamers card, the GeForce3. This makes the Quadro DCC the perfect solution for game developers creating the next generation of 3D games for these platforms.

Installation The card installed easily in the AGP slot of my motherboard, and the driver software installed flawlessly as well. The computer was up and running within minuets!

MAXtreme™ and the nfiniteFX Engine
The first application I tested this card with was 3D Studio Max 4.0, to see how well the nfinitieFX engine would enhance the creation process. I was not disappointed! I was able to run full screen animations which with fairly heavy poly counts, atmospheric fog, and particle effects in real-time. The quality while obviously not broadcast quality, was still quite impressive. There is no doubt Max animators, and game developers will realize some significant productivity gains.

Programmable Vertex Shaders
Vertex Shaders allow creative developers to add life and personality into both characters and environments. With up to 32 individual bones and muscles definitions in hardware, defining individual components of a skeleton, and muscle groups, developers are empowered to create some very realist facial Keyframe animations. Control points At different time intervals, allow the possibility for hundreds or even thousands of unique Keyframe animation sequences. As mentioned above, the Vertex Shaders also allow hardware acceleration of atmospheric, and particle systems effects in real-time.

Programmable Pixel Shaders
Pixel Shaders accelerate the real-time of lighting and surface effects, providing excellent previews of your objects surface. This allows a modeler to get instantaneous feedback while applying bump, surface, and texture maps to the models.

Other DCC Applications
Quadro DCC has been certified to work with most of the major 3D animation applications such as Max, XSI, Maya, and Lightwave. I tested several other applications, including Cinema4D XL6, AnimaTek WorldBuilder, Bryce5, Deep Paint, and trueSpace 5. They all performed flawlessly, and I realized some significant performance increases in both OpenGL, and DirectX real-time renderings.

Conclusion

The Elsa Gloria DCC will transform your PC into a graphics Workstation powerhouse. With a SRP of $800.00, upgrading your system with the NVidia Quadro DCC should be an easy decision for the creative 3D professional, as the productivity gains should pay for itself very quickly.