Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 64MB (1/9)
Hercules is one of the first companies offering a 64 MB version of their GeForce2 based card. ELSA has also announced their intention of releasing a 64 MB card, while Creative Labs have decided against such a move. The merits of 64 MB of RAM are still being hotly disputed, since there aren't any games available right now that could benefit from that much texture memory. There are only a few special cases in which 64MB cards are faster than their less well-equipped siblings. One of the greater motivations for offering or owning one of these cards is definitely bragging rights. ATi, for example, advertises its Rage Fury MAXX as using 64MB RAM with a sticker on the box. 3dfx also claims its dual-chip Voodoo 5 cards use that much memory. That's stretching the truth, though, as each chip can only utilize 32MB RAM, because they can't share the memory.
The 64MB of the Prophet II GTS 64 are "real", though. Nonetheless, its still questionable if the additional RAM has any kind of effect on performance. Hercules don't rely on RAM size entirely to make this board interesting, though - they've also raised the core and memory speeds. While "normal" GeForce2 cards run at a speed of 200MHz (core) and 333MHz (memory), Hercules has put the clock generator on steroids, increasing the frequencies to 220/366. This should be quite beneficial, as the GeForce2 based cards are mostly limited by "low" memory throughput right now. Usually, most boards are capable of reaching these speeds by overclocking, but hit their ceiling at 220/370. Courtesy of the 5,5ns DDR-SDRAM, my sample card was able to reach 400MHz (395 was permanently stable). This is impossible with boards using 6ns DDR SG-RAM. The 64's core wouldn't go any higher than any other card's, and maxed out at 220MHz. |
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| Copyright: 31.05.2000
(Tanslation by Benjamin Kraft)- RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/3dp2_64_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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