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 The 3D Prophet DDR really is a phenomenal board with
all of today's and near future functions that you would like to
see for a High performance videocard. It is based up-on NVidia's hot chip
called the Geforce 256, a Graphics Processing Unit
(GPU).
What's in the Box
In the box you'll find of course a 3D Prophet equiped with DDR memory
(more on that later), a manual, a S-VHS to Composite cable and a driver CD
along with Xing's DVD player.
Installation ran without any problems, remove your old Videocard,
insert the 3D Prophet and boot up. After your
boot-up go to your display driver properties, hit update, browse to
the drivers on the CD, in our case win9x, and hit install. After a reboot
you are set to go. (Don't forget to install the DirectX 7 drivers
BTW).
The driver CD contains drivers for
Win95/98 and Win NT based up-on version 3.64 Detonator drivers from
NVidia. You can get the latest drivers that are available at
the website from
Guillemot. Furthermore you'll find DirectX 7 on the
CD (you want to install 7 for full compatibility).
Last but not least
the tech-demo suite from nVIDIA is included, also there are some game demo's
present to show off your 3D prophet. Included and most important demo's are, TreeMark, Wanda, waves
and Bubble (which I loved the most). The Bubble demo makes use of the
GeForce's Cubic environment mapping. When you touch
the bubble it'll do weird things. Cubic environment mapping somewhat
like Matrox's Bump-Mapping.
Bump mapping is a process used where
the texture bitmap of a 3D object is enhanced by a second map that's
designed to realistically reflect or react to the light in a way that
makes the object appear "bumpy." 3D Cards originally
used "Emboss Bump Mapping", a form of multi-texturing that
approximated the effects of light. 3D Labs, NVidia, and
others have incorporated dot-based bump mapping into their hardware.
It's a nice feature, but to develop a game with bump mapping in mind
programmers would lose out on the time saved by the original
"code once" approach intended with DirectX or miss out on
each individual card's benefits.
Remember the bad guy from
terminator 2 when he walks out of the fire in chrome and he assembles himself from all
those tiny and small liquid chrome bubbles ? That's Cubic environment
mapping.
[ click to enlarge
]
DDR/SDR
The videocard is equipped with 6ns DDR (Double Data Rate) SGRAM based memory.
Lucky for us the GeForce
can handle this new DDR (Dual Data rate) memory. Why
would you need DDR ram instead of SDR ram ?
DDR memory can transfer data at twice
the speed of conventional (Single Data Rate) memory by allowing the
memory to transfer data on both the rising and falling edges of the
clock. That means twice the data and double the fun! Theoratically 6
ns DDR memory is capable of transferring data at the same speed as 3
ns SDR memory.
* SDR memory can push about ~2.24
GB/second
* DDR memory can push about ~4.47 GB/second
SDR Ram will work
fine in all resolutions, you will enjoy gameplay and framerate in all it's ways, however, for the more demanding gamers
& freaks (like me) you'd probably want a DDR version.
At
lower resolutions, the video card isn't pushing more data around than
the memory can handle, but once you get up past 1024 by 768, the DDR
card should start (theoretically) to show significant improvement in
your framerate. The DDR memory allows twice as many memory operations at once
compared to SDR. This results in twice as many bandwidth.
Transform & Lighting
What makes the GPU so special compared to a TNT-2 ? Well, it can render scenes in very
complex 3D applications and games without the use or very little use of your processor
due to hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting). The GeForce supports
every hardware accelerated function that for example a TNT-2 does,
however, it has the new added luxury of hardwa re T&L, a tremendous
step forward for real time 3D rendering.
In this small part we will try to explain Transform & Lighting
(T&L from now on). Transform actually is nothing more then the
transformation of the 3D 'space/data' of your typical game into 2D data.
When you look at your monitor you actually look at a 2D screens. When
you take a photograph with your camera the real world (3D) will be
transformed on a 2D photograph right ? That's what is getting transferred on the GPU/hardware. The
transformation is a tremendous amount of geometric data which will not
be handled by your CPU anymore (if supported by the software).
The "lighting" part is actually
very precise modeling dynamic light on surfaces.
For example, take glass and your your desktop light. Now move the
light around the glass for a while and
look at your glass. The light is reflecting, shining and moving in
several ways, that's Dynamic Lighting on surfaces. Dynamic lighting,
where object or light motion is accurately shown, is an extremely
processing dependant task, especially when you're dealing with
multiple light sources. Your GeForce can handle it with its GPU.
In general see is like this, the more your
videocard does, the less has to be calculated by your processor, the
faster your game will run with better and higher quality.
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