Aah, I finally found the time to review a product that caught my interest ever since the announcement of the product. Today we will take an in-depth look at the 3D Prophet 4500 from Hercules. Guess what ? Not an nVidia review ! You hardly thought it would be possible huh ? Seriously, when 3dfx had to leave the 3D videocard arena nVidia became one of the most popular graphics chipset manufacturer ever. Along with names like ATi, Matrox and nVidia last year I noticed a new Videologic product called Vivid! The product was a Kyro-1 based solution with an incredible feature set. The one disappointment back then was the fact that this card was not very fast, at least not fast enough to beat the competition. Manufacurer STMicroelectronics clearly noticed the loss that is called 3dfx and they put the development of their products in the 5th gear. A few months later I get a press release from STMicroelectronics. Kyro-II was born, and this little baby is powering up the 3D Prophet 4500.

Basically the Kyro-II has the exact same featureset as the Kyro-I has. I recently have met David Harold from PowerVR/Videologic and he assured me the chipset design is an entirely new one, new die, new fab, so it is not a higher clocked kyro-1. This product claims to be faster then GeForce2 MX and can beat a GeForce2 Ultra/Pro in some instances. Well .. that's not something one should tell me because I will test it :)

But first let's take a look into the Kyro-II chipset .. can you say full scene anti-aliasing, environment mapped bumped mapping, Internal True Color, 8-layer multi-texturing and dual rendering pipelines ? The Prophet 4500 can ..

Hercules equipped the Prophet 4500 with 5ns SDRAM.

The card is actually clocked at a mere 175/175MHz core/memory frequency. When compared to the Geforce2 MX which has a 175MHz core and 166 MHz memory frequency, that will about level each other. The KYRO-II architecture is unlike the Geforce or any other video card for that matter. PowerVR believes that by using less brute force, and by incorporating tile-based rendering which is a much more efficient rendering method than the conventional method used by their competitors, they have gained a considerable advantage in terms of performance and features. Let us examine what the logic behind PowerVR's claim is starting with Tile Based Rendering, the Kyro's biggest trick.