Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 review - Technology

Truform 2.0 - The Vertex Processing Engine of the Radeon 9700 Pro also includes support for Truform 2.0, the latest incarnation of ATI’s higher order surface technology. It is designed to smooth out the curved surfaces of 3D characters, objects, and terrain by increasing the polygon count through a process called "tessellation". By taking advantage of the massive vertex processing power of the Radeon 9700 Pro, it delivers more natural-looking 3D scenes without requiring any changes to existing artwork.

Smoothvision 2.0  - Smoothvision. 2.0 builds on ATI’s original Smoothvision. technology, which was the first to provide programmable anti-aliasing modes and high performance anisotropic filtering. The new version, introduced in the Radeon. 9700 Pro VPU, provides massive improvements in anti-aliasing performance, while simultaneously producing superior image quality. It also provides a new high quality anisotropic filtering technique to provide the sharpest and clearest textures available without sacrificing frame rate. As with the original version, Smoothvision. 2.0 works with any 3D application (Direct3D and OpenGL). It can be controlled either through the Display Properties Control Panel in Windows operating systems or through individual application settings.

Full Scene Anti Aliasing (FSAA) - Full-Scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) is a sampling technique that creates more detailed and realistic looking images, by removing the stair stepping effect seen on the edges of objects within computer generated images. High quality anti-aliased graphics are achieved with sub-pixel edge detection and color compression for greatly improved performance. Full scene anti-aliasing modes 2x/4x/6x.

Anisotropic Filtering - Anisotropic filtering enhances overall 3D quality by rendering sharp, detailed textures. As more texture samples are filtered, the image quality improves. Without Anisotropic Filtering, objects and environments in the 3D world will appear blurry and fuzzy, effectively degrading the level of realism.

Fullstream - ATI also presented fullstream - Fullstream is hardware accelerated filtering method that improves the performance and visual quality of Internet streaming video playback. When traditional block based videos (e.g. MPEG) are encoded and delivered with insufficient bandwidth, they suffer from inherent blocky artifacts. To remove this blocky look during playback, fullstream intelligently detects the edges of these visible blocks and smoothes them over using a sophisticated multi-tap filtering technique. fullstream improves both subjective and objective qualities of Internet video playback. The result is smoother higher quality video content and a more enjoyable viewing experience.

FULLSTREAM will be implemented by Real Player and other 3rd party partners. Details will be released in the near future.