| Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro |
Product: Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro
Manufacturer:
Hercules
MSRP: $399
Author: Hilbert Hagedoorn
Date: October, 2002
Yet another Radeon 9700 Pro review we serve you here at Guru3D.com, this time
from none less than Hercules. When Hercules decided to seek a strategic alliance
with ATi about one year ago the first products we where able to witness where
pure ATI reference based graphics cards, Hercules did not manufacture the cards themselves. Wel
l,
times certainly have changed because in my hand I have the most wicked Radeon
9700 Pro based card I have seen to date (not that I've seen _that_ many but
still).
An awesome design, again in a blue/green 'Hercules' PCB, ramsinks all over the place, GPU heatsink at the back-side of the card and a copper cooling unit that makes you wonder how far we are able to overclock this card. You will able to witness several breathtaking performance numbers, numbers that probably not one game needs right now. But with an eye focused on what's to come next year this might be the card you should opt.
We will put the card to it's extreme, we'll benchmark it with a plethora of tests, resolutions and features like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.. Why ? Because it's the only way to stress the card and the things the enthusiastic gamers expects nowadays. Furthermore we'll compare it to every known videocard of the past year and then will sum it up in a conclusion for you.
Please let me present to you by photo the Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro.
3D Prophet 9700 Pro -
click here to enlarge image
Let's quickly go through some rough Radeon 9700 Pro specifications.
- 0,15 micron GPU
- 110+ million transistors !
- 8 pixel rendering pipelines, 1 texture unit per pipeline, can do 16 textures per pass
- 4 programmable vect4 vertex shader pipelines
- 256-bit DDR memory bus
- up to 256MB of memory on board, clocked at over 300MHz (resulting in a minimum of 19.2GB/s of memory bandwidth)
- AGP 8X Support
- Full DX9 Pixel and Vertex Shader Support
Before we go in-to detail let me specify what you'll find in the retail package:
-
3D Prophet Radeon 9700 Pro (duh)
-
external power cable (hooks up to the power supply)
-
Svideo to composite plug
-
DVI to CRT gender changer
-
PowerDVD full version
-
Driver CD
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Morrowind: the elder scrolls III (good call)
-
manual and Hercules stickers
You all know and have been hearing about R300, that was the codename for the Radeon 9700 Graphics core. What's in that name ? You likely also noticed the addition of 'Pro' on the videocard's name and yes eventually there will be a 'normal' Radeon 9700 Graphics card. It's exactly the same stuff yet lower clocked core and memory. Right now this Pro model is clocked at 325 MHz and 620 MHz for it's DDR memory. Next to pounding the NVIDIA GeForce4 in the face this card is the first on the market to have full support for DirectX 9.
| RADEON 9700 Pro | GeForce4 Ti 4600 | Parhelia-512 | ||
| Performance | ||||
| Process | .15 micron | .15 micron | .15 micron | |
| Memory Clock Speed | 310 MHz | 300 MHz | 250 MHz | |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit DDR | 128-bit DDR | 256-bit DDR | |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth | 24.8 GB/sec | 12.0 GB/sec | 16.0 GB/sec | |
| Engine Clock Speed | 325 MHz | 325 MHz | 220 MHz | |
| Rendering Pipelines | 8 | 4 | 4 | |
| Peak Pixel Fill Rate | 2600 Mpixels/sec | 1300 Mpixels/sec | 880 Mpixels/sec | |
| Textures Applied per Pass | 16 | 4 | 4 | |
| Geometry Pipelines 4 | 2 | 4 | ||
| Peak Triangle Throughput | 203.1 Mtri/sec | 101.6 Mtri/sec | 110 Mtri/sec | |
| RAMDAC | 400 MHz | 350 MHz | 400 MHz | |
| Features | ||||
| DirectX Version | 9.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 / 9.0 | |
| Memory Optimizations | HYPER III | LightSpeed Memory Architecture II | None | |
| Higher Order Surfaces | Yes (TRUFORMTM II) | No | Yes (Displacement Mapping) | |
| Vertex Shaders | Yes (version 2.0) | Yes (version 1.1) | Yes (version 2.0) | |
| Pixel Shaders | Yes (version 2.0) | Yes (version 1.3) | Yes (version 1.3) | |
| Anti-Aliasing | SMOOTHVISIONTM II | Quincunx / Accuview | Fragment AA | |
| FSAA Modes Supported | Up to 6X | Up to 4X | Up to 16X | |
| Anisotropic Filtering | Up to 16X | Up to 8X | Up to 2X | |
| Temporal Filtering | Yes | No | No | |
| Video De-blocking | Yes | No | No | |
| Multi-Display Mgmt Software | HYDRAVISIONTM II | nView | PowerDesk | |
3D Prophet 9700 Pro in action-
click here to enlarge image
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