Hercules 3D Prophet II GeForce2 MX

Introduction

Something we all know, and can say without doubt is that, NVIDIA has some hotshot 3D chip engineers. But, what most folk don’t know is that they have an equally smart marketing team. Now why would I say that? If you just take a glance at there product range you’ll realize that there is a product offering from NVIDIA targeted at each different level of PC buyer. They’ve segmented the market so well, and offered each segment a product that is so ideally priced and by giving the optimum bang for the money spent they’ve basically taken over the 3D graphics market from the competition. And they don’t stop there, no no no!!! NVIDIA wants to push every pixel to the maximum in every market segment, let it be the TNT buyers or the high end Ultra; their new products keep popping up like mushrooms. This kind of market segmentation and expansion is not only adopted by NVIDIA, but also the processor manufacturing ‘giants’ INTEL and AMD have grouped there processors in features and price to cater to such individual markets.

This way they can have a market presence in each of the small markets instead of having to settle for just one large group of PC buyers. The benefits work both ways cause then the consumer also has the choice of selecting a processor or graphics card to suit his ideal requirements and price. So where does the GeForce2 MX line of cards belong? Well it’s the value and business PC market that the GF2 MX is aimed at. Basically what NVIDIA has used as the recipe for the GF2 MX is pretty simple.

• Take the GF2 technology.
• Put in two pipelines in place of the four used in the GTS
• Add a few extra features
• Voila! The new GF2 MX is born!

The Design
Due to the dual pipeline in the MX, it theoretically has half the power of the GF2 GTS. Though the original GF 256 had a quad-pipeline, it could only handle one texture per pipeline, per clock. So the MX with the dual-pipeline that can handle dual textures per pipeline, per clock, should be an in-expensive way of matching or passing the original GF 256 SDR. The standard GF2 MX which is clocked at 175MHz is well behind the High-end 200MHz GF2 GTS or the 250MHz Ultra, which both have quad-pipeline and dual-textures per pipeline, per clock. In single texture games the GF256 clocked at 120MHz default, will be faster than the GF2 MX with 480 megatexels/sec over the 350 megatexels/sec of the MX. But when it comes to multi-texture games the theoretical specification and core speeds aim the GF2 MX to be faster than the GF 256, with 700 megapixels/sec for the MX versus 480 megapixels/sec for the GF256.

(Megapixels/sec=clock rate* No. Of pipe lines

Megatexels/sec=megapixels/sec*No. Of textures per pipeline)

Though having 2 pipelines less than the GTS the rest of the 3D features of the chip are unchanged. But since the MX is clocked lower than the GTS the T&L engine can only handle up to 20 million triangles/sec. (GF2 GTS 25 million/sec)

Memory

The dreaded section when it comes to the GTS range of cards. We all know the memory bandwidth problems these very fast 3D chips suffer. The limiting factor of the GTS chip is the memory technology, which is unable to keep up with the fast 3D chips of NVIDIA. Again, it’s this very same area that the GF2 MX enters rough seas. As we know memory does not come cheap, and as a value card the price of the card had to be kept to the bare minimum.

The GF2 MX is designed to only support standard SDR memory using the 128-bit memory bus, or SDR/DDR using a 64-bit memory bus. So here we have a faster chip, with a higher fill rate, put into the GF 256 SDR league due to slower memory. The memory is clocked at 166MHz, which is the same as the GTS’s. For a chip that’s already suffering from memory bandwidth problems, cutting the bandwidth in half will hurt real bad in high resolution gaming especially with all bells & whistles on. Patience now!!. We’ll soon find out at the benchmarks.

Specifications:

GeForce2 MX 3D Processor

· GeForce2 MX engine architecture

· 2nd generation hardware transform engine

· 100% hardware triangle setup

· 2 dual-texturing rendering engines

· 4 texels-per-clock pipeline engines generate 20 million triangles per second

· Incorporates NVIDIA’s Shading Rasterizer, delivering per-pixel shading, seven pixels operations in a single pass

· Supports OpenGL and DirectX 7: environmental bump mapping, vertex blending and projective textures
· 350MHz RAMDAC

· 175MHz Core Clock

· 32 MB SDR SDRAM

· 183MHz Memory Clock (OEM 166MHz)

· 700 MegaTexels and 350 MegaPixels per second

· 4X AGP with Fast Writes / AGP 2X compatible

· AGP Support Only

· Resolutions of up to 2048×1536 in 16 million colors

Driver Version Included

· Windows 95/98 5.30

· Windows NT 5.30

· Windows 2000 5.30

System Requirements

· Pentium II and higher or compatible

· Available AGP slot, AGP 2.0 compliant

· 32MB RAM

· 10MB hard disk space

· CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

· Microsoft Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98 or 2000