Hercules 3D Prophet III

Fast Stats:

Product Name: Hercules 3D Prophet III
Availability: Available Now
Price: $529.99 USD New Price: $429.99 USD

Press Release:

BEHOLD THE POWER!
3D Prophet III - A state of the art fragging device and an ultra-realistic interactive 3D animation generator

MONTREAL, FEBRUARY 27TH, 2001 - Hercules is proud to unveil today a major milestone for hardcore gamers - the release of 3D Prophet III. This latest graphic card from Hercules offers the most powerful and most fully featured graphics processor - NVIDIA's GeForce3™. Hercules uses its expertise to push the new chipset architecture to its highest level. This new performance monster gives the most demanding gamers the opportunity to take advantage of professional graphics rendering.

A reference for new API and game enhancements

"3D Prophet III illustrates Hercules' strategy of always offering the best technology to match gamers expectations. By choosing NVIDIA's new generation GeForce3 for our high-end card, we want to offer hardcore gamers the reference processor for new API and game enhancements," says Claude Guillemot, President of Hercules. "Our 3D Prophet III is a state of the art fragging device with the first fully programmable GPU providing full hardware optimization for new interactive environments and highly complex 3D animations."

Optimal fluidity of photo-realistic 3D characters and graphics-heavy scenes

3D Prophet III's tremendous performance levels result from combining the most advanced GPU architecture with the strongest chipset and Lightspeed Memory Architecture™, based on 64MB DDR RAM operating at 460MHz. 800 Billion operations/sec generate blazingly fast frame rates during game play, particularly in the highest resolutions. 3D Prophet III's highly innovative programmable nFinite-FX™ Vertex and Pixel Shading engine support DirectX 8's new generation of real-time animated texturing and geometric effects hardware. GeForce3's new features enable special effects to be processed in hardware by the GPU, offering an unprecedented boost in rendering quality and 3D frame rate, fully accelerating OpenGL 1.2 and DirectX8. 3D models and 3D environments have never been more crisp, vibrant and highly detailed in real-time gaming, allowing such highly complex geometry as reflective bump mapped objects, natural character skinning and new advanced transform and lighting features to truly come to life.

Hercules superior design

Hercules optimized the board design to push its performance ahead of existing solutions, and improved the stability of its product by incorporating a customized cooling solution. Through Hercules 3D Tweaker 2.0 application, gamers can tweak the graphic card's settings according to their needs for frenzied gaming sessions. 3D Prophet III also offers users the opportunity to experience DVD movies on their PC and TV with PowerDVD™3.0, providing them with silky smooth DVD playback on NTSC and Pal TV sets from 640X480 to 1024x768 (HDTV-like) resolutions, enhanced by the GPU's motion compensation engine. 3D Prophet III's DVI is able to output to digital flat panel monitors up to resolutions of 1600x1200.

Price and availability

3D Prophet III will be available in March for $ 529.99 (USD).

Specs:

System Requirements

• Pentium® II / AMD K6® and higher or compatible
• Available AGP slot
• 64MB RAM
• 10MB hard disk space (More to install games)
• CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
• Microsoft Windows® 95 OSR2, Windows 98 and higher

Multimedia:

Flash file ripped from Hercules.com announcing their Prophet III card:

P/Reviews:

• TBreak Preview
• Active Windows Review
• Guru3D Review
• Overclocker's Australia Review

Comments:

Hercules was the first company to actually announce their GeForce3 card officially, in fact they sooped up the release quite a bit using flash animations about a week before the card was ready to be announced. The animation said that there was something new coming that will blow everybody away, and it was replaced by the above flash animation.

Looking at the picture of the card, it seems like there may be heatsinks for the memory. We'll have to make sure of this when there are higher resolution shots. As for other features, the card will have a DVI connection, finally we are starting to see this become a standard. The card also has TV-Out which is a nice addition. I was a little upset to see it clocked at the same speed as the stock NVIDIA card, especially from Hercules, who is usually known as having the faster of the cards.

Update: 3/1/01 We got a chance to look at some high res shots of the board, and they do feature heatsinks for the memory. So this is now a confirmed feature.

Update: 5/18/01 The new pricing makes the card $429.99 which still makes it an expensive card, but much better!

>> Microstar Starforce 822

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