Dynamite Specs!

Who are Hercules?

Hercules has been in the PC video sector for a while now, having been founded in 1982. Back in the days of the original IBM PC, Hercules established the standard for video with the "Hercules monochrome" standard. This video standard went on to become industry-wide, and Hercules continued through the graphics industry, mainly in the higher-end workstation graphics market. Finally, in 1992, Hercules came back to its roots in the PC arena, and has been producing accelerators for the mainstream market. Let's take a look at the specs of their latest and greatest:

TwiN-Texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline

32 MB 5.5 ns SDRAM

300 MHz RAMDAC

100% hardware triangle setup

16 and 32-bit ARGB rendering (RGB plus alpha)

Single pass multi-texturing support, square and non-square texture support

Point-sampled, bilinear, trilinear, and 8-tap anisotropic filtering

Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping: fog, light, MIP mapping

24-bit Z-buffer, 8-bit stencil buffer

Full scene anti-aliasing

AGP texturing

128-bit 2D pipeline, optimized for 8, 16, 32-bit color depths

Support for textures up to 2048x2048 (2K x 2K)

Maximum 2D/3D resolution of 1920x1440

AGP 4x/2x/1x support, with sideband support

Bump mapping (emboss), light maps, reflection and environmental maps

TV-out

At first glance, the Dynamite TNT2 Ultra is an impressive looking card. The 32 MB of RAM is setup in a 16 x 2MB configuration. Upon closer inspection we saw that it was 5.5 ns RAM. Additionally, a heatsink and very nice looking fan are sitting on top of the chip itself, keeping it cool at those higher clock speeds! After running the card through many benchmarks, the heatsink was hardly warm. It looks like one of the problems with the initial TNT chipset has been solved.