There is quite simply no holding nVidia back. Hot on the heels of the top-performance GeForce2 GTS chipset, with its capacity for up to 64Mb of fast DDR (Double Data Rate) RAM, comes the GeForce2 Ultra, with even faster core and memory speeds. The Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra is the first GeForce2 Ultra card that we have had the chance to take a close look at, and the results are impressive to say the least.

First impressions turn to the cards striking appearance. Mounted on a very funky blue PCB is the GeForce2 Ultra chip itself, running at a staggering 250MHz, and cooled by an efficient little fan that has a passing resemblance to the highly-praised Orb range of fans from Thermaltake. This is not the limit of Herculess efforts to keep the cards components cool, with there being four ribbed blue heatsinks also attached to the eight RAM chips. The RAM is 4ns DDR SDRAM, which means that it is rated for a maximum theoretical speed of 250MHz, doubled to an equivalent of 500MHz. On the Prophet, however, the RAM is clocked at only 230MHz, giving an effective speed of 460MHz - which is still a very impressive number. The extra cooling and conservative memory clock also gives you some breadth to play with in terms of overclocking.

Besides the change in clock and RAM speed, the specification of the GeForce2 Ultra is identical to that of the GeForce2 GTS. This means that it has the same integrated T&L (Transform and Lighting) engine, quad texturing pipelines, AGP 4X support, FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing), and the NSR (nVidia Shading Rasteriser), amongst other hyperbole. So what does all this mean in real-world terms? In order to push the card to its limits, I fired it up on a VIA KT133-based Asus A7V motherboard with a 1GHz Athlon CPU and 128Mb of PC133 SDRAM, and ran it through 3DMark2000 Pro (www.madonion.com) and Quake III Arena.

The Ultra clocked up an incredible 7,930 3DMarks in 1,024 x 768 at 16-bit colour, and even managing an impressive 3,285 3DMarks in 1,600 x 1,200 at 32-bit colour. This puts the Ultra only a few per cent faster than the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 64Mb (Speed Award issue 37, p61) in low resolution, but it comes out a clear 25 per cent faster when it comes to the high resolution test, which is where the faster memory especially comes into play. In Quake III Arena these results were mirrored, with the Ultra managing a clear 25 per cent lead over the Hercules GeForce2 GTS 64Mb in High detail at 1,600 x 1,200 resolution.

What all this amounts to is an incredible amount of 3D performance packed into the one card. Furthermore, the 3D Prophet II Ultra features an S-Video output port and a digital DVI port for connection to LCD displays. The only drawback to the card is its exceptionally high price. Granted, the nVidia GeForce2 Ultra chipset is a marvel of modern semiconductor engineering, but at $999, you are paying an unprecedented amount of money for a consumer graphics card. In fact, for this much money, you could fairly comfortably buy yourself an AMD Athlon/700MHz CPU, new motherboard, 128Mb of PC100 SDRAM, and a GeForce2 MX 32Mb card. This means that if performance at high resolution is your primary concern, and you have the money to spare, then the Hercules GeForce2 Ultra is the obvious choice, although for the rest of us, the GeForce2 MX is a much more affordable option, and is not that much slower in normal gaming resolutions of around 1,024 x 768.