Manufacturer: Hercules

Lately (past year) we've seen a new trend in in the videocard market. A lot of manufacturers moved their 32MB videocard into a 64MB platform. Why? Quite logical .. dear Watson. Videocards have gotten a level of performance that will allow playing games with acceptable framerates in resolutions above 1024x768x32bit (10x7) pixels. When you reach way beyond 10x7 resolutions you'll need more memory to store all those juicy textures and 3D scenes in that memory.

So, does a videocard with mid-level performance up to 10x7 as the GeForce2 MX does really benefit from 64MB memory ? To be honest, I really doubt it. But we'll find it out by a good set of benchmarks. I was also curious how many of you actually play games in high-resolution above 10x7. Before I started writing this review I placed a poll on the front-page with the question 'At what resolution do you play games'. Out of hundreds of votes this was the result:

At what resolution do you play games
640x480	2.33 %
800x600	16.03 %
1024x768	59.73 %
1280x1200	11.26 %
1600x1200	4.41 %
the resolution that has the best framerates	6.24 %

By far the most of you play in 10x7 ..

The product we test today comes from Hercules, it's the 3D Prophet II MX with 64 MB SDRAM memory. It offers an valuable entry price into the latest generation of super-compact "low-profile" format graphics boards with hardware transform and lighting and of course the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR) pipeline. The NSR allows 7 pixel operations to run in a single process, textures and lighting effects are calculated in real time in a single cycle on both pipelines..

Is the more expensive 64MB worthy to this videocard ?
Let's find out ..