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In the Forums... |
Posted: May 30, 2000 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Drivers (cont.)  In the above shot, you have your choices of output devices ranging from your standard VGA monitor to DVI flat panel (which is not implemented in the 3D Prophet II GTS -- perhaps a deluxe version will include the appropriate connector). For TV, the Prophet has a S-Video out connector and includes a composite adapter for those of us without S-Video In compliant devices. Virtually all VCRs and TVs have a composite in connector. We recommend using S-Video if you can because it gives better overall visual quality. The images are sharper and clearer than composite and text is more readable on a TV, but then again why would you want to read text on the TV? We’re assuming if you are going to use TV output you’re likely outputting full screen DVD, playing a game or doing a large format presentation.  Here we have our last significant tab, the overclocking tab. This part gets really interesting and ironic at the same time. Remember those heatsinks on the memory modules? They didn’t help at all. In fact, the Prophet couldn’t overclock as high as the Gladiac. The Gladiac reached 230/360MHz without problems and played fine. With the Prophet, we experienced graphical corruption inside Windows itself while going that high. Any higher and you get massive tearing and snow -- and this wasn’t even heavy 3D acceleration.  Click to enlarge Above is a screen shot of Quake 3 in the NV15 level. Even at a relatively low overclocking setting (210/345), we get visual artifacts. I have highlighted a few parts in the images that anomalies cropped up. Notice the snow effect in the above screen shot? Those are not suppose to be there. This was corrected when we lowered the speed down to 205/240. Here it is interesting to ask whether or not the memory modules on the 3D Prophet II are the same as the ones on the Gladiac. We are starting to have doubts. And what’s with the low core speed compared to what the Gladiac was able to reach? It’s possible here that Hercules received a batch of chips from NVIDIA that weren’t as high quality as the ones that were sent to Elsa. It’s hard to tell who is to blame, it could be Hercules or it could be NVIDIA. Since the 3D Prophet II doesn’t use a reference design like the Gladiac, that could be another factor in overclocking the Prophet. Let’s get on to some benchmarks. Benchmarks We're used Mad Onion's 3Dmark 2000 and id Software's Quake III Arena to test the 3D Prophet II’s performance. Test systems: Pentium III 450MHz @ 558MHz Asus P3B-F motherboard Athlon 800MHz @ 856MHz Asus K7M c1.04 motherboard Micron 256MB 133MHz SDRAM 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB - NVIDIA Detonators 5.16 Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Quantum Fireball ATA 33 |
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