Pros: Insanely good graphics, appreciable frame rate.
Cons: Some fill problems at high rez.

With this strong of a showing, Hercules is certainly trying to put themselves on the map of computer video hardware! I was completely blown away by the insanely realistic graphics that this card was able to generate while I was playing Red Storm's Rogue Spear at Full Resolution and Detail Settings. The card is still quite pricy and isn't expected to fall to earth anytime in the near future so it may not be popping up in many office or corporate machines.

Clocks Speed
A number of companies are putting out GeForce DDR cards and as of the time that I am writing this, not a single one can surpass the memory and bus speeds that the 3D prophet is spitting at the monitor. Boasting a super fast 130Mhz bus speed, this memory card can now match today's average motherboard bus speeds, allowing for super fast piping of graphics information and frame rates to the monitor. The faster 150Mhz memory speeds allow the fastest data retreival availible on a video card. I tell you from seeing this myself, this card just blows my mind at the graphics that it could produce.

Graphics Processing
Because it utilizes nVidia's GeForce 256 processor, this card can, by itself, do the geometric calculations and processes to produce transform and lighting effects without using the computer's main processor. This speeds up the game as there is less strain on the main processor and it gives the computer the chance to execute more programming instructions per second than would otherwise be possible: the bottom line is that you are going to see more incredible dynamic graphics per second than you have ever seen before. This card is also the first card to be able to use a four pixel pipeline so it can issue smoother frame rates in multi-textured programs like you would encounter in most of today's action computer games.

Unfortunately, all of this power at your fingertips also comes at a high price in high resolutions. As with all of the GeForce-based cards, the 128 bit interface with the memory bus begins to scale down the possible performance you could have had if the fill rates that the interfaces uses had not been utilized. In the future, this problem may be fixed but for right now, it is something you are stuck with.

Memory
In an attempt to create a solution for this fill-rate problem that slows down frame rates and hampers progress at higher resolutions, nVidia has started to use DDR (Double Data Rate) memory for the card. What this does is uses the same kind of actions that your usual AGP bus on the motherboard will use to accelerate data transfers up to quadruple speed. This makes a difference of about 15fps in your average action game's action.

DVI/TV Out
Unfortunately, the TV out that this card uses is not very good by any means. The picture is fuzzy and distorted at times, causing your eyes to hurt if you are trying to read small or medium sized text. Needless to say, this could severely impair your multimedia presentation to your boss or college class. The DVI support is a new thing in video cards and makes an excellent addition to this video card. It may not make up for the lousy TV-Out but at least they tried.

Overall
Overall, this video card is incredible in all of its facets. There are minor problems that do not detract very much from the overall function of the card itself but they do warrant some weariness when considering this card. The software bundle includes an excellent DVD software player and drivers for windows 98 and NT4.0. You cannot use it in Windows 95. Easy to setup, powerful, and versatility make this Video card an easy 5.