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Rules of Engagement
Out of the BoxWhat I plan on doing in this article is an overview of the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB, not a navel-gazing benchmarking or frame-rate counting extravaganza. I'll leave that to people who understand what the hell "4 dual texturing pipelines, mapping 8 texels per clock cycle" actually means and can use it in a sentence without smirking. Stuff like that is better left to those smarter than I. Want hard numbers? Check out some of the reviews linked on the Hercules/Guillemot site. What I will attempt to do is show via screenshots of some common sims the visual difference between the Voodoo3 accelerated images and the GeForce2 GTS ones. I'll review the quality of the card. And, most important of all, I'll try to throw enough info at you to answer the most important question of all: "Yeah, but is it $350 better?"
The Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB is a very cool looking piece of hardware, as geeky as that may sound. The large blue anodized heat sink and fan assembly help keep the 200MHz core clock GeForce2 primary chip cool, as the smaller blue aluminum sinks do on each of the four 333MHz DDR-RAM modules. All of these are nailed to a blue PCB board. Very color coordinated.
The card is as about as easy to install in a WinBox as any peripheral could be. The excellent instruction manual assists in such tasks as running a successful search-and-destroy mission on the old drivers for the card being replaced and the installation of the new as idiot-resistant as possible.
Control FreakOne bummer about the Hercules card is that the software bundle is rather weak, but this is largely offset by the 3D Prophet IIs TV-out capability. There is an S-video to RCA video converter pigtail included. I didn't install the PowerDVD software that the card comes with, however, as I don't have a DVD player- yet. For what it's worth, I've read that it's one of the better DVD playback programs. Whatever. In any case, the lack of bundled software is not such a huge deal, as most of the time the included games are pure cheese.
The control panel is excellent, offering a large spread of tweaks available to those who understand what they are. I, for one, wouldn't know an 8-tap anisotropic auto-mipmap method if it jumped up and crapped on the hood of my car. I do understand the fun of overclocking, however, and the Hercules card software has a slider for GPU and the memory speed. With the honking aluminum heat sinks and fan that stud the card, you would think you could crank this puppy hard. In my limited experimentation, however, I could not get much over a 10% bump in speed before things got weird under Flanker. Oh well. Your results may vary.
Fig. 2. GeForce2 Control Panel
