Firstly let me say this is not an in-depth look at this card with endless graphs and boring lists of specs. For a refreshing change this review is for those of you who want to know if it’s worth the $1000 expected price tag. Does it cut it? Do you have to sell the car / mortgage the house and sell the kids into slavery so you can get one? If you're after specs, check out Hercules Asia's page for the 3D Prophet III.
Impressions out
of the Box.
If you like pretty hardware
then your're going to love this. The Blue PCB, Blue Orb Heatsink
and Anodized Blue Ramsinks are just purdy. This is also the heaviest
card I’ve ever held. With standard SVGA monitor connector,
TV out and DVI (flat panel) support it's going to last you a while.
Removing my Hercules GTS2 Ultra from its home in the BorgII I installed the new card and booted up. Card was detected and I pointed it to the drivers I had on the HDD….mmm something is wrong. Didn’t find the drivers at all and Win2k thought the card was a VGA card. After a few reboots and trying to get the drivers installed I just ran the exe file from the Det 11.01 package and it installed fine. I've also since heard from others that just pointing it to the DIR doesn’t seem to work for installing a driver.
Ok, let's see
what this baby can do.
Using the old GTS2 Ultra (gee
it's funny to say that) 3dmark ran pretty well scoring me around
3200 points with a P3 800 but not all of the benchmarks were supported
(Nature and Pixel shader). Without any tweaks or even looking
at the driver setting in the control panel I fired up 3dmark2001
and sat back to see what it was like. Well its like going from
an old TNT2 to my Geforce2. The difference in visual quality was
apparent from the start. Shadows and smoke was far better, Textures
were far more detailed, FPS was increased and the whole benchmark
was smoother with a score around 4300. The benchmarks that weren’t
supported with the GF2 Ultra were unbelievable. The visual quality
just blew me away and from someone using an Ultra card that’s
saying something. I then decided to tweak this card a little and
see if the overall score was better. Using the usual high performance,
no Vsync, max settings I let 3dmark run right through again and
submitted it to the online database. Well being in the top 50
in the world isn’t too bad :) Scoring 4839. I’m really
keen to get my new CPU and DDR ram installed to see what this
can really do. Most of the highest scores being on overclocked
Thunderbird CPU’s I'd say I’m going to be even more
impressed when the P3 gets retired to the server box and my new
1.33 AXIA is up and running.
So is it worth
the cash?
If you have a lazy $1000 or
near then my opinion is yes. The picture quality has to be seen
to be believed. In games like Counterstrike, Quake3, Tribes 2
the FPS is much higher (especially at high res) Playing CS @ 1600
x 1200 with a few registry hacks and still getting over 50FPS
still amazes me. Tribes2 is smooth and image quality and FPS almost
perfect even when using the higher resolutions. In 2D applications
the quality was still there and no issues I could find at high
resolutions were apparent. The card worked flawlessly other than
the initial driver install and as it was only on loan I was very
sad to see it go back. So much so I sent it back with an order
for one for myself and a larger order from the staff of the store
I work in. If you have a older TNT2, Geforce 1 or MX card then
you are going to see a huge difference in frame rate, visual quality
and supported features currently being incorporated into the newer
games and software. I've seen quite a few ppl that would argue
that the price is way over the top. As this card has come in cheaper
than the ultra did when it was released, the pricing is actually
quite good for the increased performance. If you can afford it
you will be very happy with this card.
Lastly I'd like to thank Guillemot Australia for the loan of the card and my wife for putting up with a hardware and gaming addict :)
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