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- Date:
- Wednesday, April 10, 2002
- Author:
- Steve Lynch
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
Hercules 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE
As you might know, Hercules has a new partner in crime in fellow Frenchman, ATi. Let's see if Hercules' first ATi GPU based VidCard stands up to the Hercules namesake.
Introduction:
Hercules is a company that has been around the graphics card arena for a long time, establishing a top notch name for itself along the way. At the same time, Guillemot was busy putting out some very, very strong cards of their own. These two companies would join forces soon after the original Hercules filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 1999.
Now we all know that having great products does not always mean you will have market success, just look at the now defunct 3dfx. But Hercules had developed such a strong market presence and valuable name that Guillemot saw a perfect opportunity to revive the Hercules product line and infuse their own quality craftsmanship into the Hercules line. This isn't to say that the new Hercules hasn't had their share of bumps and bruises, and as with many companies, driver issues and the like have cropped up here and there. Today, the Hercules branded cards carry the now-familiar blue PCB and accessories, but most importantly, they continued the proud heritage of a quality product.
Enter ATi into the equation. Hercules has almost always featured NVIDIA based graphics cards since they began producing video cards. Recently, Hercules had decided to drop the popular line of NVIDIA graphics chips after ATi decided to allow their Radeon line of cards to be produced by outside companies, something ATi had never allowed in the past.
All this leads up to the fact that Hercules is now a major producer of ATi based graphics cards. This brings their high quality manufacturing process (and nifty blue PCB) combined with the awesome technology of the Radeon line of cards, giving the end user what is arguably one of the best ATi based video cards out there.
Specifications:
Pentium® 4/III/II/Celeron™, AMD® Athlon® with AGP 2X/4X universal slot 64MB of system memory Installation software requires CD-ROM DVD playback requires DVD drive
TRUFORM™ SMARTSHADER™ DirectX® 8.1 support OpenGL® 1.3 SMOOTHVISION™ anti-aliasing HYPER Z™ II CHARISMA ENGINE™ II PIXEL TAPESTRY™ II VIDEO IMMERSION™ II High Performance Memory Support Dual Display Support Integrated Transformation, Clipping and Lighting Twin Cache Architecture SuperScalar Rendering Single-Pass Multi-texturing True Color Rendering Triangle Setup Engine Texture Cache Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering Line & Edge Anti-aliasing Full-Screen Anti-aliasing Texture Compositing Texture Decompression Specular Highlights Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping Mip-Mapping Z-buffering and Double-buffering
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Emboss, Dot Product 3 and Environment bump mapping
Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid and Cubic environment mapping
Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing
RADEON™ 8500 graphics processing unit (GPU)
64MB of double data rate memory
Windows® 98/98SE Windows® Me Windows® 2000 Windows® XP
CRT Monitor: 15-pin VGA connector TV and VCR: s-video or composite connector DVI-I (flat panel display) connector Display support Register compatible with VGA BIOS compatible with VESA for super VGA DDC1/2b/2b+ monitor support VESA Display Power Management Support Separate horizontal and vertical synchronization at TTL levels
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The Card:
You will notice that while the card does stick to the standard reference design, the Prophet FDX 8500LE has been treated to the Hercules blue PCB "make-over". Unlike many companies that simply add their stickers to an ATi reference board and call it good, Hercules does in fact make their own boards.
Something I have never been fond of with ATi products is their decision to glue all their heatsinks to the GPU. Most performance enthusiasts like to use aftermarket cooling solutions on their video cards whenever possible, having to chisel off the old unit and scrape off cured thermal epoxy is somewhat of a drawback. There are some positive aspects, though. The Hercules unit is stylish and provides better cooling than the standard ATi unit, not much...but better.
Hercules uses Hynix memory rated up to 250MHz (500MHz DDR), which is a tad disappointing for those of us with high memory overclocking aspirations. This does not mean it is impossible to overclock the memory, it just means it can be difficult. Hercules makes no bones about the card's core/memory speed, as displayed in bold lettering on the front of the box. Our original Radeon 8500 OEM card (used for reference in these photos) was rated at 250 / 250, although it did carry the Hynix memory that was rated for 275MHz (550MHz DDR).
Video encoding / decoding is handled by the Rage Theater chip which employs 10 bit analog / digital conversion and keeps signal to noise ratio at a minimum while providing the highest color resolution possible.
The RAGE Theater is a low-cost, multi-standard video decoder/encoder that will enable OEMs to bring the digital multimedia revolution to a whole new range of applications. RAGE Theater's advanced hardware design, when coupled with the ATI Player™ software, enables and enhances such popular applications as Web surfing, Internet use, multimedia creation and gaming, motion video capture, videoconferencing and video editing. RAGE Theater's TV-out quality is enhanced with features including exclusive signal noise reduction circuitry, including Continuous Sharpness Control, an exclusive image sharpening filter which produces high bandwidth studio-quality DVD images. This is especially important for real-time MPEG encoding, as it removes high frequency vertical and horizontal noise, which confuses DCT encoders and reduces the level of compression. RAGE Theater's Text Sharpening Filter enhances text sharpness and clarity, especially important for Web and Internet use.
A quick look at the Hercules board compared to an OEM Radeon 8500 shows that they are, in fact, almost identical except for color.
The Hercules card is fitted with Standard VGA, TV-Out (S-Video), and DVI-I interfaces. Also included is an analog VGA to DVI 15-pin connector so you use the second video output (the DVI-I) which enables ATI's HYDRAVISION™ multi monitor support.
HYDRAVISION™
Your productivity is increased thanks to two aspects HYDRAVISION™: Breadth - increase your desktop work space by using up to two monitors and Depth - create multiple layers of desktop workspace with Multi-Desk
ATi's HYDRAVISION has the ability to run different displays at various refresh rates simultaneously. Most of you who run dual displays know how difficult it can be to run separate refresh rates on separate monitors ( It should be noted that you can't use a DVI-to-VGA adapter to power dual monitors since the 8500LE only has one RAMDAC ). HYDRAVISION also allows you to configure which display is selected as "Primary" and "Secondary", as well as which monitor will be hardware accelerated. Very cool stuff.