First off, this card is painfully expensive. At $350, it better have some improvements over the original geforce. And it does. With FSAA (full-scene anti-aliasing), the second generation T&L (Transform and Lighting) engine, 32MB of DDR (Double Data Rate) memory, and per-pixel shading and lighting, it's way past the original geforce. Admittedly, Nvidia needs to fix their FSAA driver, and some of the original geforce cards do have DDR memory, but nonetheless the Hercules II is much better than any original geforce. And just to dismiss voodoo 3 cards from this little one-person debate, the most memory that any voodoo 3 has is 16 megs, and none of them can render in 32bit. Voodoo 3's are good cards, but they will be not much more than a paperweight within the next year or so.
So back to the geforce race. With the geforce 2 (specifically the Prophet II), you may be paying $150 dollars more, but it will last you for quite a while. And even though some of the features aren't really being used in games right now, the game manufacturers will take avantage of them soon, and everybody who bought an original geforce instead of a geforce 2 will be kicking themselves because they see how much full-scene anti-aliasing smooths out the look of the game, and how the second generation Transform and Lighting engine makes the game run faster. So maybe for now the geforce is fine, but say that you pay $200 for a geforce card now, and in a year you realize that you really need the geforce 2, and you pay another $300. Now, let's see, excuse the sarcasm, but we all know basic math, and which would be a better deal, $350, or $500? Hmmm. In my personal opinion, I need to spend an extra $150 for nothing like I need a full frontal lobotomy. But if you really want to, be my guest. This is just my opinion.





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