Review: Hercules 3D Prophet 9600 256MB

Graphics Technology

• Hercules 3D Prophet RADEON™ 9600 Visual Processing Unit (VPU)

Memory Configuration

• 256MB of double data rate SDRAM

Operating Systems Support

• Windows® XP
• Windows® 2000
• Windows® Me

Display Support

• VGA connector for analog CRT
• S-video connector for TV / VCR ¹
• DVI-I connector for digital flat panel ²
• Independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays

Features

• 4 parallel rendering pipelines
• 2 parallel geometry engines
• 128-bit DDR memory interface
• AGP 8X support
• SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
  • Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
  • 16 textures per pass
  • Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
  • Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
  • Multiple render target support
  • Shadow volume rendering acceleration
  • High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
  • Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL®
• SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
  • 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
    • Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
    • Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options
• HYPER Z™ III+
  • Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
  • Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• TRUFORM™ 2.0
  • 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
  • Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
  • Displacement mapping
• VIDEOSHADER™
  • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
  • FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
  • Noise removal filtering for captured video
• MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
• YPrPb component output*
• Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
• Dual integrated display controllers
• Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
• Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant)
• Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
• Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!
• PC 2002 compliant

SMARTSHADER 2.0 literally refers to the Hercules' ability to run DX9 pixel and vertex shaders. SMOOTHVISION 2.1 is ATI's enhanced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering options, and Hyper Z III is the collective term for the much-needed bandwidth-saving techniques. The 9600, with only 6.4GB/s of potential bandwidth, needs all the help it can muster.