On sept 6 I joined an workshop at the Hercules office here in Holland. This workshop was organized for people who were not able to attend the ATI meeting on the 9700 and 9000 chips. On top of that Hercules wanted to show something new in the sound department as well. Some parts were on NDA, but on the 9th of sept NDA was lifted.

After ATI launched their new products, we at beyond3d got the exclusive deal on reviewing the 9700Pro. But Hercules will launch the ATI boards in Europe, not ATI. Altough this is the official word, with the 8500 I have seen actual ATI boards showing up here in Holland. But officially Hercules will be the vendor for Europe.
Hercules will launch the 3DProphet 9000, the 3DProphet 9000 PCI, 3DProphet 9000 PRO and the flagship 3DProphet 9700 PRO. It's quite a line up and I think there will be more variations added later on. I think an All In Wonder should be somewhere down the line also. It's not clear which board is going to be used; either the 9700, 9000 or something else. We talked about other possibilities and a dual 9700 will be there (as the CEO of ATI said some time ago), only the card will be released as an FireGL product.

The talk went into where ATI could go from here (smaller micron, other ram types etc). Especially the talk on how the 9700 could be clocked higher was intresting. It seemed that the plan of ATI was to build an 10 layer PCB board. This would ensure higher clockspeeds as we see today. However a 10 layer PCB board can not be build in every factory around the world. Today, with the 8 layer PCB design, almost any factory can build the 9700. ATI expected the board would be a success and clocked everything lower, so that a bigger market penetration was possible. We will see in the line-up that there is no ultra cheap version (below 100 Euro), I believe there is still room for an 64MB version of the 9000 with an AGP bus. But on the other end, we will see prices dropping during this X-max, I suppose. There is a rather big gap between the 9000Pro and 9700Pro card. I think ATI will put in the 9500 here. These are still rumors of course, but Hercules and ATI both need a card between the 200 and 500 Euro section. ATI themselves are aware of this and rumors are that they are going to fill the gap with the 9500. A slower version of the 9700 chip, with less pipelines comes to mind.

Hercules 3DProphet 9000 128MB
The 9000 will be the new entry level and will be priced at 149.99 EURO (Recommended retail price). Bundeld with PowerDVD 4.0XP and 3Deep, coupled with 128MB it would make an intresting buy for the people who are looking for a new card, to play some games and watch some DVD's. AGP is supported with 2X and 4XAGP. Of course it will work in you AGP8X board also.

• 250Mhz core/200 Mhz DDR (400Mhz)
• AGP 2X, 4X
• DirectX 8.1 part
• OpenGL 1.3
• 128MB DDR
• 4 pipelines
• Based on ATI Radeon 9000 GPU
• Pizel shader 1.4 and Vertex Shader 1.1
• Hyper Z II, Charisma Engine II, Smoothvision, Truform

Hercules 3DProphet 9000 64MB PCI
The 64MB version will be actually a PCI based part. Apparently there is still a market for PCI based devices and here is the Hercules part. Of course for the really nutty people among us; an extra PCI based card for 4 monitor hookup would possible also. The card will be priced at 169.99 EURO (Recommended retail price). Market segment: casual gamers, casual multimedia enthousiasts.

• 250Mhz core/200 Mhz DDR (400Mhz)
• PCI
• DirectX 8.1 part
• OpenGL 1.3
• 64MB DDR
• 4 pipelines
• Based on ATI Radeon 9000 GPU
• Pizel shader 1.4 and Vertex Shader 1.1
• Hyper Z II, Charisma Engine II, Smoothvision, Truform

3DProphet 9000 PRO
The flagship of the 9000 based cards. Priced at 199.99 Euro (Recommended retail price). The card will have 128MB ram, clocked at 275Mhz (550Mhz). The GPU core will be clocked also at 275Mhz.

• 275Mhz core/275 Mhz DDR (550Mhz)
• AGP 2X, 4X
• DirectX 8.1 part
• OpenGL 1.3
• 128MB DDR
• 4 pipelines
• Based on ATI Radeon 9000 GPU
• Pizel shader 1.4 and Vertex Shader 1.1
• Hyper Z II, Charisma Engine II, Smoothvision, Truform