Review: Hercules 3D Prophet II PRO (1/7)

3D Prophet II PRO

It's like an unwritten law: every new iteration of graphics chips needs a new name or suffix. NVIDIA started this tradition with the TNT line of cards. First came the TNT, then the TNT2, which was superceded by the Ultra and then the PRO. This time around it's the GeForce2 chip that needs suffixes to make it possible to distinguish between its multiple variations. So far we have the bargain MX, the standard GTS, and the Ultra. Now, to bridge the gap between the GTS and the expensive Ultra, NVIDIA has introduced the GeForce2 PRO, basically a normal GeForce2 GTS with faster 400 MHz (DDR) memory. Looks like the only adjectives left for this round are Hyper and Super-Duper.

People new to the graphics card arena are sure to be confused and overwhelmed by NVIDIA's offerings, let alone the rest of the market today. It's easy to lose track of the individual cards' capabilities and features. So let's take a quick tour of NVIDIA's current line-up of cards, taking the manufacturer Hercules as an example. Basically, all chips run at the same corespeed, except for the MX (clocked slightly lower) and the Ultra (clocked higher). Hercules adds to the confusion here, setting the clockspeed of the MX and the GTS 64 models higher than per NVIDIA's recommendation. The table below provides a pretty good overview of Hercules' product line. Please, again note that the MX and GTS 64 are clocked higher than the corresponding reference designs.

GeForce 2 Pro chip

The most important changes in the GeForce 2 PRO once again concern the memory. Right now it's all about memory bandwidth, since higher resolutions and greater color depths demand more and more memory performance, thereby creating a bottleneck. Triangle setup and polygon count aren't a problem for these powerful chips today, but once you start playing around with features like FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing), the memory bus can very quickly get saturated. Unfortunately, the production techniques aren't advanced enough yet to allow cheap mass production of faster memory modules that could keep up with modern accelerator chips' demands. This dictates the following strategy for most manufacturers: offer an affordable "standard" product with slower memory and an expensive "high-end" part with fast memory.

So where does the Hercules 3D Prophet II PRO fit in? Like many other manufacturers, Hercules is offering the complete line of NVIDIA chips (see table for reference). The PRO seems comparable to the GTS 64, which in Hercules' case was originally clocked higher than the competition's 64MB model. Supposedly Hercules later encountered compatibility problems and was forced to lower the clockspeed back to the standard 200MHz through a BIOS update. The card I used for testing still uses the original BIOS - and runs  pretty stable with the higher settings. So, now let's take a closer look at the Hercules 3D Prophet II PRO.

Copyright: 03.11.2000 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
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