July 21, 1998—ELSA AG, a world leader in multimedia graphics products, today announced the latest addition to ELSA’s award-winning line up of consumer graphics accelerators, the ELSA Erazor II. Featuring the state-of-the-art RIVA TNT graphics processor from NVIDIA Corporation, the ELSA Erazor II targets the performance segment of the PC graphics market with 250 mega-pixels-per-second (MPPS) fill rate, over 8 million polygons per second, and a full 128-bit memory interface to deliver incredible 3D quality and performance.
"The introduction of the Erazor II marks a turning point in consumer graphics", remarked Uli Theissen, president of ELSA Inc. in Santa Clara, California. "With the expanded functionality and performance of the NVIDIA RIVA TNT, Erazor II will now be the board of choice for both gamers and professionals."
"ELSA's 15 years of experience in developing, producing and marketing PC peripheral equipment for the professional and consumer graphics markets is a testament to ELSA's strong position in the 3D graphics industry", said Jeff Fisher, vice president of sales at NVIDIA Corporation. "Today's announcement of the ELSA Erazor II, using the RIVA TNT, promises to meet the high demands of the performance graphics segment."
The powerful new RIVA TNT with it's TwiN Texel processing engine, integrates a dual-pixel 32-bit color pipeline with 24-bit Z buffer, 8-bit stencil buffer and per-pixel precision. RIVA TNT can apply two textures to a single triangle while processing two pixels per clock cycle to yield twice the pixel fill rate. The 250-MHz RAMDAC is capable of driving the most extreme resolutions, color depths and ergonomic refresh rates up to 1600 x 1200 x 32bpp at 85Hz.
ELSA's new-generation Erazor II is expected to set new standards for 2D and 3D graphics performance and quality in the mainstream market. Featuring a 128-bit graphics pipeline to the frame buffer interface and support up to 16-MB of frame buffer memory and AGP 2X high speed interconnect, the result is a powerful solution for traditional 2D software and 3D intensive games and DVD titles.
ELSA Erazor II will be optimized for Microsoft's PC '98 and Direct3D™, including the DirectX 6.0. The outstanding DirectX support of the ELSA Erazor II ensures superb multimedia quality across a wide range of graphical applications. In addition to full optimization for DirectX 5.0/6.0 and Windows 98, ELSA provides full support for an OpenGL ICD (Installable Client Driver) for Microsoft® Windows® 95 and Windows NT®.
The ELSA Erazor II also supports dual texture engine capabilities for single-pass multi-texturing and single pass trilinear texture filtering. This allows 3D tasks like shading and dual textures to be processed through two separate graphics engines simultaneously, completing these complex tasks in only a single cycle of the processor. With previous generation controllers these tasks required the pixel to make two passes through the rendering engine. This ability makes the ELSA Erazor II up to four times faster than previous generation accelerators.
The ELSA Erazor II will be available with 8-MB or 16-MB of high speed synchronous memory and is targeted at the high-end Performance PC and Professional PC segments. Availability is expected in late Q3.
NVIDIA Corporation designs, develops, markets and sells high-performance 3D processors for personal computers. NVIDIA has been recognized as one of the hottest semiconductor companies in Upside Magazine's December 1997 article titled "Mr. Hot Chips '97" and was honored as The Most Respected Private Fabless Company by the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) in November 1997. NVIDIA is a privately held company with venture financing. Corporate headquarters are in California: NVIDIA Corporation, 1226 Tiros Way, Sunnyvale, CA 94086. (408) 617-4000. http://www.nvidia.com.
ELSA AG is a publicly traded company based in Aachen, Germany, with subsidiaries in Santa Clara (California, USA), Taipei (Taiwan), and Tokyo (Japan). Founded in 1980, ELSA has built up a world-class reputation for applying advanced engineering expertise to computer graphics and data communications products. Technological competence, German standards of quality, leading-edge products and services backed up by excellent support: These are factors which firmly place ELSA at the forefront of the market today.
Further information for the press from:
ELSA AG, Jorg Mühlenberg, Sonnenweg 11, 52070 Aachen, Germany
Phone: +49-241-606-4141, Fax: -4099, EMail: jm@elsa.de
All names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The ELSA logo is a registered trademark of ELSA AG.