Introduction

It's been quite some time since we last reviewed a graphics card here at Technoyard. Since the time the first Geforce 3 graphics card arrived into the market, this industry has experienced phenomenal growth in terms of sales revenue and technological advancements. I remember how eagerly we were anticipating the arrival of the Geforce 3 into the market last year, and boy what a lot has changed since then. Now not more than year after the introduction of the GF3 nVidia has plans for the Geforce 4 as well. We can expect to see these boards pretty soon on the shelves.

What we'll be looking at today is one of the titanium series graphics cards from Hercules; the 3D Prophet II. Founded in 1982 Hercules is now under the Guillemot Corporation. Even though they have faced many up's and down's over the past, Hercules has remained in the lime light right throughout. It was only very recently Hercules released their line-up of the Geforce Titanium GPU, and we would like to thank Hercules for giving us the opportunity to look at their 3D Prophet II card based on the Geforce 2 Titanium GPU.

Lets take a look at the specifications of the card before we go any further

Specifications

Graphics processor
Memory	64MB on-board DDR RAM memory
Bus	AGP 2X/4X
Memory interface	128-bit DDR
Memory type	250MHz DDR RAM qualified
Core clock speed	250MHz
Internal chipset bandwidth	8GB/s
Brute rendering architecture	4 pixels pipelines 2 texels for each pipeline 2,000Mtexels/s
3D acceleration features enhancements	Hardware T&L
Special effects	Cube environmental mapping Bump mapping Hardware Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) Vertex blending Texture compression Lighting, Shading…
RAMDAC/Pixel cycle	350MHz
Output options	High-resolution TV encoder (up to 800x600) VGA Output
Supported API(s)	DirectX® & OpenGL®
Bundled Software	Hercules Quake3 level (H3ShoDne map) PowerDVD™ 3.0 3Deep® NVIDIA Demos

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Intel Pentium® II / AMD K6® and higher or compatible versions
• Available AGP 2.0 compliant slot
• 64MB RAM
• 10MB hard disk space (or larger for installing games)
• CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
• Microsoft Windows®XP, Me, 98, 95 OSR2, 2000 or NT4 or later