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| Installation
Of The Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra |
| Piece
of Cake... |
|
Well,
what is there to say about the installation of the
3D Prophet II Ultra? Fortunately, not
much! Now that "Plug-and-Play" has
had some time to mature and shake the
"Plug-and-Pray" moniker, hardware
installation has become much easier. The 3D
Prophet II Ultra installed without a hitch.
We plugged the card into our AGP slot, turned the
system on, inserted the driver CD when prompted
and one re-boot later we were off and running. One
thing we were really happy to find was that the
included drivers were based off revision v.6.35 of
nVidia's Detonator 3 drivers. We were glad
to find this because the latest
"official" revision available from
nVidia's site is v.6.31. This demonstrates
to us that Hercules is committed to providing new
driver updates in a timely manner. When
nVidia releases a new official driver set, you can
bet Hercules will have an updated version
available quickly. With the exception of a
few graphical tweaks, the Hercules drivers are
very similar to the reference drivers. Let's
take a look...
I'm
sure if you're familiar with nVidia reference
drivers you noticed we didn't take a screenshot of
the "Hardware Options" tab and for good
reason. The 3D Prophet II Ultra comes with a
very simple utility called the "Hercules 3D
Tweaker"
We
liked the Hercules 3D Tweaker quite a bit because
is gave us quick access to our overclocking,
V-Sync and FSAA options. The Hercules 3D
Tweaker places a simple icon in your system
tray. A double-click and you've got your
options all in one place. With nVidia based
cards from different manufacturers being so
similar, the "little" things like this
are sometimes what makes us prefer one card over
another.
We've
been using the 3D Tweaker in conjunction with the
v6.35 drivers for over a week now and no problems
are readily apparent. Quite a bit of gaming
was gone and the compatibility and visual quality
was excellent. We enabled 2X2 FSAA and
snapped a quick screenshot during a game of Quake
3 Arena to give you an idea of what to expect...
Click to
enlarge...but beware modem users...this is a big
file.
This
shot was taken at 1024x768x32 with all texture
quality and geometry settings at maximum. At
this resolution with FSAA enabled, the game slows
down a bit too much for our liking but the visuals
are absolutely fantastic.
We'd
quickly like to mention that 2D image quality was
excellent thanks to the fast RAMDAC. Text
was crisp and colors were vibrant. If nVidia
would implement their Digital Vibrance feature
into the GTS / Ultra chip, 2D image quality would
be even better. My last review was of a
GeForce 2 MX based card and now that we're without
the Digital Vibrance control, we miss it. :(
Quality
and Comparisons
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