The Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra
So Cool...it's blue...

By, Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta
January 4, 2001

H.H. Test System
Schwing!

InWin ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 933EB, Asus CUSL2 (i815) Motherboard and Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra w/64MB of DDR SDRAM, 256MB of PC133 True CAS2 Mushkin SDRAM, IBM 30GB 72000 RPM ATA100 Hard Drive, Plextor UltraPLEX 40 CD-ROM, Windows ME, DirectX 8.0, Hercules drivers (Detonator 3 6.35 based)

Benchmarks With The Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra
Let's get movin'!

We ran our usual benchmark suite on the 3D Prophet II Ultra.  To test the card's video / DVD playback performance and quality we ran MadOnion's Video 2000.  To test performance in Direct3D we ran 3D Mark 2000 v.1.1 also from MadOnion.  OpenGL performance was tested with MDK2's built-in timedemo and with Quake 3's Demo0001.  V-Sync was disabled for all of the tests.

Video 2000 was the first test we ran...

VIDEO 2000

The Video 2000 scores are on par with other GeForce2s we've tested.  It looks like we'll have to wait for the NV20 to see if Video 2000 scores are taken to the "next level".  Next Up...3D Mark 2000:

3D MARK 2000 v.1.1

The 3D Mark scores posted by the 3D Prophet II Ultra are excellent.  We were basically CPU limited all the way up to 1024x768x32.

Its time for some OpenGL tests.  First up is MDK 2's built in timedemo.  Hardware T&L and MipMap dithering were enabled for all MDK2 tests.

MDK2

Very Nice.  It's like the Ultra was made to play MDK2.  16-Bit color isn't the prettiest option though, let's take a look at some 32-Bit Numbers.

For the sake of comparison we threw some numbers in from our Gladiac Ultra review.  As you can see, the 3D Prophet II Ultra just barely edged out the Gladiac but only by a frame or two. Realistically, this was a tie.

We also overclocked out 3D Prophet II Ultra to see what kind of performance gains we could squeeze out of it.  We had very good luck, hitting a completely stable 305MHz. core clock speed and 500MHz. memory clock speed.  Let's see what kind of performance increase it resulted in shall we?

We had a 10% increase at the highest resolution.  We think folks will enjoy squeezing a 10% performance gain out of what is already the fastest video card currently available.

More Over-Clocking, Quake 3 and The Rating