Hercules 3D Prophet 9000 Pro

The 3D Prophet 9000 Pro promises to give you more bang for your buck.

Price: £139

Manufacturer: Hercules

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Verdict

Pros:

Fast; good value

Cons: Lack of software

Overall: Besides the lack of software, the 3D Prophet 9000 Pro is worth every penny. Particularly impressive were its OpenGL scores - something that will keep fps fans happy - and excellent DVD playback. However, you could do just as well with a Geforce4 Ti4200

Mark Walsh, Personal Computer World 05 Sep 2002

This latest card from Hercules is the first to feature ATI's Radeon 9000 processor. The new chip, more widely known by its codename, RV250, is a revision of its 8500 chip, which still retails for twice the price.

This preproduction sample comes from Hercules, as ATI no longer makes its own boards.

The 9000 chip has a 275MHz core and dual-400MHz Ramdacs. This version of the card comes with 64MB of DDR SD-Ram. As we were going to press it was announced that the 64MB version would not be sold across mainland Europe, although there aren't any plans to withdraw it from the UK market.

A 128MB version is also available, and will be sold across Europe. Its 8Gbps memory bandwidth and 128bit GPU is pretty much average, but in this price bracket, performance is the real key.

Overall, it's pretty impressive, scoring only slightly lower than the Radeon 8500. In fact, there's not that much difference between it and Matrox's Parhelia, which costs three times as much.

When held up against test results from last month's graphics card group test, the 9000 wipes the floor with the competition in Jedi Knight II, giving 80.9 frames per second (fps). So, OpenGL is excellent, but tests on the Direct3D-based Comanche 4 were a little disappointing.

However, these scores average out as the equivalent to Nvidia's Geforce4 Ti4200, which is just as well-featured. You can currently find such cards for under £100 if you search the internet hard enough. This comes as quite a disappointment considering ATI's claims that it will blow anything in the price range out of the water. That said, these are not the final drivers; things could well improve before final release.

DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 compliant, there are plenty of 3D features.

HyperZ II, the bandwidth-saving technology first adopted with the 8500, is included here. This uses three techniques to compress the data that moves through the Z-buffer and, once finished with, remove it as fast as possible so it can handle the next task more quickly.

The 8500's Charisma Engine II, the powerful geometry engine capable of 60 million triangles per second, is also present, as is Smoothvision. This proprietary anti-aliasing algorithm uses supersampling to create allegedly sharper images.

While this could well be the case, our eyes were no way near sharp enough to detect any difference between the finished result and that of its competitors.

This also means that at 4 x FSAA (full-scene anti-aliasing), the card takes a big performance hit, due to the immense bandwidth needed to supersample at such a rate. DVD and realtime streaming is top notch thanks to hardware-accelerated mpeg2 decoding. ATI's Hydravision desktop management system means it can also support dual displays.

There are VGA and DVI outputs, as well as an S-video out, and it can output at up to 1,600 x 1,200, but that should be no surprise for a £140 card. Interestingly, the Rage 3D chip, which is responsible for TV output, has been integrated into the GPU. The heatsinks and fan are compact, so you could still use your top PCI slot and leave enough room for air to circulate.

The lack of software is disappointing. Hercules has supplied just PowerDVD 4, along with some 3D tweaking software and the drivers. We would have hoped for more considering the price.

The 3D Prophet 9000 is an excellent performer and has plenty of features for both 2D and 3D performance. It's not the be all and end all that ATI (and indeed Hercules) were hoping it might be, but you could do a lot worse.

Specifications