Blue Wonder? The Guillemot/Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS

OpenGL-Performance: Quake 3 Arena

This chart shows the results for the 3D Prophet II GTS as red bars for both clock frequency combinations. 200/333 resembles the official nVidia specification, 210/340 are the default settings from the manufacturer (overclocked). The green bars show the results of the predecessor chip GeForce 256. All other GeForce2 candidates receive a different color. We will keep this color combination for all the following charts.

The Demo001 with a color depth of 16 bit from Quake 3 Arena puts the smallest demands on the Hercules card. We will later increase the complexity of the demos, the color depth and the z-buffer. But even with our 866 MHz Pentium III the values are very close to the limit at 1600x1200. Owners of 'smaller' CPUs will already observe a jerky picture at this resolution.

At high-quality resolutions and 32 bit color depth Quake 3 becomes pretty much unplayable at the 1600 resolution. However, with the standard resolution of 1024x768 the 3D Prophet II achieves excellent results of 81 and more frames per second - even if it only runs at standard clock frequency.