Yesterday was, Today is

Claiming an unimaginable 800 million pixels per second (Mpps), the 3D Prophet II is obviously not going to be slow. It achieves these speeds by being based on NVIDIA's superchip, the Geforce2 GTS.

NVIDIA have gone through an amazing transformation as a company, sparked by the release of their original TNT chipset, almost exactly two years ago. Before that stage they had taken a few knocks and at a time when 3DFX dominated the 3D video card arena, it would have come to no surprise to anyone if they, like quite a few other companies at the time, just packed up and went home. The release of the TNT chipset changed everything for NVIDIA and re-established them as a serious competitor. Following on from the success on the TNT, the imaginatively titled TNT2 was launched six months later and finally crowned NVIDIA as number one in the performance stakes. As rivals released their newer chipsets, that number one spot didn't last long until NVIDIA outshone everyone with the release of the Geforce 256, which supported true 32bit colour 3D at amazing speeds, something the main competitor, 3DFX was still not capable of. The Geforce 256 has seen a few minor changes in the roughly 10 months it has been available and the addition of features like DDR memory has kept NVIDIA consistently at the top of the performance charts.

Now NVIDIA have reset the benchmarks again with the release of the Geforce2 GTS. In terms of technical advancement, the GTS could really be seen as yet another progression of the Geforce chipset. It has been reduced from 0.22 to 0.18 Microns with the core speed increase from 120MHz to 200MHz and the memory speed increased from 150MHz to 166MHz.

The reduced assembly of 0.18 Microns allow the board to house 25 millions transistors and also requires only 10W of power, half the amount of the original Geforce chipset.

The theoretical fill rate of 1.6 Gigatexels per second is achieved by having a quad-pipeline architecture capable of two textures, per pixel, per clock, per pipeline. To keep up with the Jones', the T&L engine has been enhanced and had the 'C' or clipping feature added to compete with ATI's latest offerings. Another main feature of the Geforce2 GTS is that texture compression is now enabled by default and when used in conjunction with the latest drivers, some real performance gains can be seen with supported software.

The Hercules version of the Geforce2 GTS chipset comes with a nice set of features and is very well presented, as you would expect from a well-established company such as this. The cards itself has TV/SVHS out, supports DVI-out for connection a digital monitor, has 64Mg DDR Ram, supports 2X and 4X AGP and comes complete with PowerDVD for DVD playback. There is an unobtrusive fan covering the GPU itself and each of the memory chips has individual heatsinks.

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