Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS (1/9)

Every car enthusiast has heard the argument: "What good are those shiny wheels if you can't see them while you're driving?". One possible answer is that you could adjust your rear-view mirrors so that you can see them...or that you can catch their reflection in big shopwindows....

The frontside. Hercules own layout with great cooling solution.	Backside: Top right you can see the TV-Out chip

It's kind of like that with the new Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS. This card just looks fast. This isn't just another boring green or brown PCB. What you'll be holding in your hands is a long, turquoise board with light blue shimmering heatsinks. (Always reminds me of vacation and beaches...). While other companies want to cut corners and try to save costs on every component, Hercules have been very generous¸ attaching a heatsink to each of the memory chips. It remains to be seen whether this will have any effect on the card's overclocking potential, as it isn't usually the memory chips that suffer from heat-related problems, but rather the clock generator - which is integrated into the graphics chip itself. However, the heatsinks did get noticeably warm during testing. It is hard to say whether this was due to a warm-running board or hot RAM chips. Either way, the inclusion of heatsinks its justified by looks alone.

Great look	TV-Out and VGA connectors	Complex Power regulation

But let's get to the technical Data. This board is based on NVIDIA's reference design, slighly altered in that the voltage supply has been moved further back. The 0.18 micron GeForce2 GTS chip runs at a stock 200MHz. The 6ns DDR memory is clocked at 166 MHz, equivalent to 333MHz. This is a mere 33MHz increase in memory bandwidth, and NVIDIA caught a lot of flak over this, since that's only slightly better than what the older GeForce DDR had to offer. You have to give NVIDIA credit for improving on the GeForces rather modest fillrate though, which has been effectively doubled.

The GeForce2 utilizes four optimized renderpipelines, each one capable of rendering either four pixels or eight texels per clock - twice as many as the old GeForce was capable of. This increase in raw power has enabled NVIDIA to implement their newest feature, dubbed "Giga-Texel-Shading". One application for GTS would be realistic surface reflections and other such eye-candy. Of course you could use an old GeForce to render these surfaces, but their lack of fillrate would make it a rather slow and therefore unpleasant experience.

Copyright: 10.05.2000 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/3dprohet2_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-)