By Marc Spiwak

Among the dizzying array of graphics cards available, there's now another solid candidate. ELSA's Victory 3D is a very capable graphics accelerator that, at $239 for the 2MB of DRAM version, is competitively priced. And if 3-D acceleration is important to you, this card deserves an even closer look.

The Victory 3D is a 64-bit, 2-D/3-D PCI graphics accelerator based on the S3 ViRGE chip. This chip speeds up graphics by integrating 3-D rendering, 2-D GUI and video acceleration with a RAMDAC and clock synthesizer. The Victory 3D supports 3-D APIs including S3d, Direct3D, OpenGL, 3DR, Brender and Render-Ware. Digital video acceleration is provided with hardware support for DirectDraw and DCI.

I had no trouble installing the Victory 3D under Windows 95. I tested a final version of the card on a 150MHz Pentium system with beta software and drivers. The drivers installed and performed well. On our Wintune video test, the Victory 3D averaged 15.33Mpixels per second at a resolution of 800x600 with 256 colors. At 16 million colors, the card clocked an average of 13Mpixels per second.

An included utility, ELSA WINman, adds adjustments for refresh rates and screen position to Win95's configuration options.

The Victory 3D smoothly accelerated .AVI files all the way up to full screen. Beta glitches prevented full MPEG testing.

The Victory 3D is an impressive package. When the final software ties up the card's few loose ends, it should prove a worthy competitor in a crowded marketplace.

--Info File--
ELSA Victory 3D
Price: $239
Pros: 3-D capabilities; price
Cons: Uses DRAM only
Platforms: Windows 95, 3.1x
ELSA
800-272-ELSA, 408-935-0350
WinMag Box Score: 3.0