The Card
Hercules 3D Prophet II GeForce 2 GTS 32mb
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
NVIDIA took the top spot for the video card market last year with the release of the GeForce 256 chipset. Overpowering and dominating the 3dfx Voodoo cards, NVIDIA was set on the high road of a gamers’ heaven. No other card was as powerful as the GeForce and then the DDR enabled GeForce cards. 3dfx planned on stopping all that with the announcement of the Voodoo5 series, a dual processor video card set to turn the end-user video card market around. Their announcement, it seems, came too early. In one of the most amazing announcement-shelf times ever, NVIDIA announced their GeForce 2 GTS chipset. With days of the announcement eager, power-hungry gamers could find these cards at their favorite online shop. And only a couple weeks later, they found the cards on the retailer’s shelves across the nation. It has been a great pain to 3dfx and a great pride to the folks at NVIDIA.
I have gone over this before, so I’ll make the mention of the GeForce chipset in general a little lighter than normal. Below are some of the features of this new chipset of video cards:
- AGP 4x/2x with Fast Writes
- Four new Hypertexel pipelines process two texture per pixel, in true color, at full speed up to 1.6 Gtexel fill rate
- Built-in 32 MB high speed DDR video memory with up to 5.3 GB/sec bandwidth
- Eight texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle
- Multi-buffering (double, triple, quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback
- Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- Integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC supporting from 640×480 up to 2048×1536 in true color
- Video acceleration for Direct Show and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo
- S-Video output
