Hercules - 3D Prophet II MX
Manufacturer
- Guillemot
Monday, July 31, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium III
Coppermine 500E @ 667 MHz, i820 133Mhz FSB 196 MB PC-133 SDRAM
Software used
Windows 98 SE
DirectX 7a
Detonator Drivers 5.22
Today
we will be taking a closer look at the 3D Prophet II MX, yet another
GeForce2 review you might say. Well, yes and no actually ... Yes, it
is a geforce2 card, no it's not the usual GeForce2 GTS that we all
know, heard and probably some of you dream of. NVIDIA (well known for
their innovative marketing skills) must have had the idea that the superb
GeFore2 GTS is out of range for a lot of customers due to it's high
(350-400 dollar) price. In fact, only customers with a huge wallet can
purchase this card. What to do .. NVIDIA might have though. Why not
'castrate' the Geforce2 GTS and make a cheaper GPU (Graphics Processing
Unit). So the idea was born and rumors started to float on the
Internet and everyone noticed codename NV11 in the newest Detonator
Drivers. NV11 was indeed the comparative GeForce2 MX.
What does the GeForce2 MX do that
it's big brother (GF 2 GTS) does not have ? Well, I can give you a
short answer here, the speed of it's predecessor. Furthermore
this card has all the cool options of the GeForce 256, GeForce2 GTS
and even some more new options like TwinView and Digital Vibrance
Control (DVC).
The Specs
- 256bit graphics core
- 0.18 micron technology
- 175MHz graphics core working
frequency
- 2 rendering pipelines, with 2
texturing blocks each
- 128bit (SDR) memory bus and 64bit
(DDR) memory bus supporting 166-300MHz correspondingly
- The supported memory types
include: DDR SGRAM and a standard SDR SDRAM/SGRAM
- 8-64MB local graphics memory
- 2.7GB/sec memory bus bandwidth
- Pixel fillrate: 350Mpixels per
second
- Texel fillrate: 700Mtexels per
second
- 350MHz integrated RAMDAC
- Max display resolution - 2048x1536
at 75Hz
- Integrated Dual-Link TMDS
transmitters, which allow connecting two digital displays
independently
- External bus interface: full AGP
4x/2x (including Fast Writes).
- Built-in High-Definition Video
Processor (HDVP), which allows turning PCs into full-quality DVD
players and HDTV receivers/players
- Digital Vibrance Control, which
makes all images including 2D, 3D, and video more colorful and
vibrant, even on digital flat panels
3D Graphics
Second generation integrated
Transformation and Lighting engines
- HW T&L capacity (peak): 20
million triangles per second
- 8 source hardware lighting for the
whole scene
- Full OpenGL and DX7 support -
Transform and Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective
textures and texture compression
- NSR (NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer)
engine
- Supports Full-Scene Hardware Anti-Aliasing
(HW FSAA)
- Full support of DXTC and S3TC via
DX and OpenGL correspondingly
- Rendering in 32bit color mode
- 8-bit stencil buffer
- 16/24bit Z-buffer
Coming up: the
videocard review continued
|
