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3D Prophet SDR and DDR
comparison
Manufacturer: Hercules (Guillemot)
Base Chip: nVidia GeForce 256 GPU
Clock/Memory: DDR is clocked higher
Memory On-board: 32 Mb SDRAM (or DDRAM: 6ns Infineon)
AGP features: AGP 2X/4X with Fast Writes
TV-OUT/DVD-support: Yes
DVI-support: Yes only with DDR version
Retail Price: 167$ SDR / 279$ DDR
System Req: PII, free AGP-slot, 16Mb Ram, 10Mb free HD, Cd/DVD-Drive, Win95OSR2/Win98/Win2k
Date posted: 19 September 2000
Written By: Bjorn
Introduction
Finally our 3D Prophet SDR - DDR comparison has seen the light! It took a bit longer because we had 2 severe crashes which basically wiped out all the data and images of this comparison. That's the main reason why this review is NOW online.
But you could ask yourself: "Why a comparison of 2 graphic cards that are already out for some time?". Well we from PlayDevil.com do believe that there are still gamers out there that don't have the funds to buy 400$ - 500$ graphic cards.
Because lets face it ... the graphic industry changes fast ... at a very fast rate and when you 'NOW' buy a video-card, in about 6 months or even less, its big brother has arrived with 'faster' frame rates, better features, more stable drivers etc etc etc.
So basically what we wanted to do is to make a comparison between (now cheap cards) Hercules' (or Guillemot's) 3D Prophet SDR and DDR version of Nvidia's first Geforce 256 GPU chip.
In this first page we'll go a bit in-depth with the Geforce GPU chip (mainly for newbies). In the second page more info about the 'big' differences between the SDR and DDR-DVI 3D Prophet.
We decided not to publish any benchmarks of these 2 video-cards. Why? Well since these cards are already available for some time and a new pair of graphic cards have hit us (Geforce 2 GTS) you probaby have seen benchmarks enough. It is not that we don't want to publish them but lets face it, you know how fast or how slow they are on several systems so no need for us to publish them again.
However, in our upcoming Geforce 2 GTS and MX comparison you can expect of course many benchmarks since these cards are pretty new.
Anyway, for the gamers that are looking for a decent but not expensive card, lets move on!
The Geforce 256 GPU is ...?
It is not our idea to overwhelm you with technical aspects of both cards but we do believe that when you know a bit more technical background of what the chip can do, you will be more amazed by its strenght and technologies.
Both cards are basically almost identical. The DDR-DVI version has DDR ram (instead of plain SDR) and it also has a DVI output. More on these 2 items later in the review.
So here are the main new features and exciting technologies that this card, the 'Hercules' 3D Prophet SDR/DRR has:
- Integrates the world's first Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) from NVIDIA, the revolutionary 256-bit GeForce256 generating up to 15 million triangles /second
- 32MB high-speed memory (SDR or DDR)
- 256-bit quad-pipeline processing
-
480 million texture-mapped pixels/ second
- 350 Mhz RAMDAC
- AGP 4X with Fast Writes
4 engines:
- Hardware transform engine
- 256-bit rendering engine enabling:
- Unrivalled visual quality in games
- The rendering of 32-bit (true color) games
- Hardware lighting engine (8 hardware lights)
- 100% Hardware triangle setup
- Four-pixel-per-clock pipeline engines which generate an unprecedented and amazing 15 million triangles per second and 480 million pixels per second!
-
Most advanced 3D functions: AA, fogfogging, mip-mapping, fully operative bump mapping, 32-bit Z-/stencil Buffer for greater depth and details
- Most advanced supports for OpenGL® (Silicon Graphics) and DirectX® 7 (Microsoft®) such as cube environment mapping, vertex blending and projective textures.
- Both cards have a TV-Out feature
for NTSC and PAL TV Output
-
Hardware accelerator is present for smooth DVD-Video playback
The DDR version of Hercules' 3D Prophet also has a DVI output (more on that later).
As you can see, it is a very impressive list of new features to keep the framerate fast in todays games.
And more and more games are coming out with build-in T&L support (Transform & Lighting Engine). The T&L part of this card is the most important part of the whole GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of a Geforce 256 SDR/DDR. The T&L engine takes alot of work from the CPU and process it in the card.This means that the CPU can do alot of other tasks like AI, sound, etc etc which results in better gameplay and framerates.
The best example to show off with a Geforce256 is to load up Q3A and compare it with a Voodoo 3 card. No offence to V3-lovers out there but you have to agree, Q3A flies on a Geforce256. :-)
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