So Much For The Voodoo That You Do
Written: Sep 05 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Amazing Framerates
Cons: Plain Demos
|
|
|
| infielderx's Full Review: Hercules 3D Prophet |
In the beginning, God said "Textures and high polygon counts are good"; Then he picked up a copy of Entertainment Weekly and forgot all about what's important in computer gaming (aside from gameplay, graphics) until 2,000 years later.
Several years ago I found myself knee-deep in the 3d video card craze, and ran out to pick up a Voodoo2 card from Circuit City. It ran games like Quake 1, 2 and then for a short period, Quake 3 Arena quite respectably. As time marched forward, I began to realize (through reading countless reviews and articles on new video card technology) that my trusty voodoo2 card was approaching the feasibility of Dan Quayle teaching a law class at Harvard. This coupled with the fact that my buddy here recently picked up a TNT2 card for his Athlon, which more than blew away my voodoo2. For months I peeked at his monitor, noticing how non-pixelicious his clouds were in Quake 3 Arena.
Always the type to one-up someone, I found a bargain on a geForce 1 card, the 3d Prophet from Guillemot. The first incarnation of the geForce series has been out for several months now, so it made perfect sense to grab one up at such a cheap price ($180 Canadian). Buying a video card as soon as it comes out is never a good idea, usually because there aren't any games out there that can fully utilize it's features. Whereas the voodoo2 cards were limited to puny polygon counts (I believe 256X256), the geForce could more than quadruple that; remember prior Quake 3 clouds in the sky example. Games like Soldier of Fortune and Heavy Metal Faak 2 also look amazing with this card (both take advantage of the geforce's 32bit color capability); Soldier of Fortune in particular has special instruction written in to the game for the geforce's "hardware transform & lighting" feature.
In layman's terms, this simply means that instead of the CPU doing all of the calculations (for example: what color an object is and how a light source from any particular angle might change the appearance of the object when shining on it), the videocard itself does most of it. This results in much faster framerates, the holy grail for gamers. Running a benchmark on the videocard using "3dMark 2000", I achieved a score of 3,833 at 800x600 resolution at 32 bit color. Framerates were consistently above 60fps (the naked eye can't detect much higher). With the voodoo2 install, I scored a lowly 1,705 at 640x480 at 16 bit color (Voodoos 1,2 and 3 can't do 32 bit color). Both tests were run on a Pentium 3 450 with 128MB of Ram.
This card comes with a video out feature, which I haven't yet tried. Seeing as how computer monitors have better resolutions than television sets, I don't think I'll bother. There is a bundled adapter for those of you that want to hook up this baby to a digital flat panel monitor. But then, if you can afford one of those, you might as well purchase a geforce 2.
The bundled demos included Speed Busters, an F1 racing game and a few other more childish ones.
I'll be happy with this card for long time, or at least until my friend here buys it from me, so I can go out and get the Asus 7700 (for it's video capture feature).
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 140
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
infielderx
|
|
Member: David Bragg
Location: Frederick, Md
Reviews written: 145
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
31 year old Pizza franchisee (what a mistake!) and computer geek.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.