Of praise that Hercules was able to garner years Let's find out if this card is worthy of the type Today we've got Hercules' latest card in the lab, the 3D Prophet II Ultra. ![]() Issues a later BIOS revision was released to bring the card back down to nVidia's "recommended" speed. In a move reminiscent of the ill fated TNT2 Ultra, they even opted to ship theirģD Prophet 2 GTS at a higher clock speed than the competition, but due to some stability With every new chip nVidia released, Hercules / Guillemot released a new itineration of the 3D Prophet, all of them considered among the best in their class. It garnered much praise and was a very successful product. The 3D Prophet was packed with features and offered excellent performance. Guillemot already had a line of TNT2 cards available but when nVidia's GeForce GPU arrived, they put the Hercules name on what was arguably the best GeForce card available, the 3D Prophet. Guillemot, lesser known here in the USA, decided to acquire what was left of Hercules. For all intents and purposes, the company was dead and basically closed their doors.Īs it turns out, this was the end of Hercules, as we knew It turns out that although Hercules seemed poised to stake a claim at the "high-end" gamer market, they were hemorrhaging money and the company was in dire straits. Very few cards ever shipped though and many customers were left out in the cold. Hercules, in an aggressive move, decided to sell their TNT2 Ultra card clocked considerably higher than any of their competitionīy using "hand-picked" chips and many gamers jumped at the opportunity to pre-order one. It was now time for nVidia's "refresh" product.the TNT2 Ultra. Hercules debuted their TNT2 based product, the Dynamite TNT, and word spread about its quality and performance. ![]() NVidia's TNT2 was just about ready for prime time. S3's chipsets were being called the first "3D Decelerators",ģdfx bought STB and stopped supplying chips to other OEMs and ![]() Sales however, Hercules never enjoyed the high profits and dominant position the company had experienced in the past.įorward to 1999.2D acceleration has gotten so fast the difference in speed between the competing chipsets is virtually indiscernible without benchmarking Using chipsets from virtually every manufacturer including S3, 3dfx, nVidia and TSeng, the Hercules product line became very diverse and highly regarded. From 1992 on, Hercules began offering products based on third-party chipsets in an attempt to gain market share in the increasingly growing Windows Accelerator market. However, times change and nowhere is this more evident than in the PC For many years to follow, it was commonplace to find Hercules products in home systems and high-end workstationsĪlike. Hercules monochrome graphics adapter became an established PC standard (I actually had one.Geez, I'm ancient!). Way back in 1982, the technology behind the
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