HERCULES 4500 KYRO 2 REVIEW

"Hercules 3DProphet 4500 Kyro 2 review featuring the Kyro 2 GPU which we last tested 2 years ago in our Videologic VividXS Kyro 2 review. In this article we test the Hercules 3DProphet 4500 Kyro2 against the Elsa Gladiac 511 GeForce2 MX 400. Software used for benchmarking is as follows:- 3dmark 2000, 3dmark 2001 SE, GLexcess, Quake and Quake 2."

2001 saw the release of the PowerVR Kyro2 chipset, the first two video cards to use this chipset was the Hercules 3DProphet 4500 and the Videologic VividXS. The Hercules 4500 was fitted with 64mb memory while the cheaper Videologic VividXS had 32mb. Later versions of the Videologic VividXS were fitted with 64mb memory. Other makes of Kyro2 were later released by such companies as Apollo (Inno3D), Powercolor, Shadow and Suma. The main difference between the Kyro2 and the earlier Kyro chipset was a speed increase from 115mhz to 175mhz.

The Kyro2 uses tile based rendering instead of the more common immediate mode rendering used in such cards as the GeForce2. With immediate mode rendering all of the scene is generated, with tile based rendering only visible parts of the scene are rendered. This approach is obviously more efficent and it means that the video card has to process less information thus saving memory bandwidth.

Even though video cards are getting more and more powerful all of the main graphics chip producers face the same problem, memory bandwidth. The higher the resolution, colour depth or number of polygons the more memory bandwidth you will need. You can only pass a certain amount of information over the video card's memory bus, this is the problem they are all facing. ATI was first to tackle the memory bandwidth problem with their HyperZ technology which provides a huge 40% performance increase in some tests. Nvidia introduced the Lightspeed Memory Architecture for the , however none of these go far enough to prevent the latest video cards from being limited by memory bandwidth.

There's one chipset which doesn't use immediate mode rendering, it uses something very different. Something efficent, something called tile based rendering. Tile based rendering is nothing new, it's been around for quite a while but so far has never really caught on. However with the release of the powerful Kyro2 chipset I'm sure that's all about to change.

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS HERCULES 3DPROPHET 4500 KYRO2 6343 3780 3588 ELSA GLADIAC 511 GEFORCE2 MX 400 3472 2960 3571 3DMARK 2000 3DMARK 2001 SE GLEXCESS COMMENT - "The Hercules 4500 Kyro2 beats the ELsa GeForce2 MX easily with the older 3dmark 2000 dx7 benchmark. With 3dmark 2001 benchmark which is a dx8 benchmark (both video cards are dx7 so are unable to run the dx8 benchmarks) the scores for both video cards was reduced, however the Hercules 4500 Kyro2 still finished ahead of the Elsa GeForce2 MX by 820 points. Both video cards perform roughly the same with the opengl benchmark gl excess. Now onto the detailed game results for 3dmark 2000 and 2001." BENCHMARK SETTINGS 3DMARK 2000 1024x768 Resolution 32Bit color D3D Hardware T&L Triple Frame Buffer 3DMARK 2001 SE 1024x768 Resolution 32Bit color D3D Hardware T&L Antialiasing Disabled Double Frame Buffer Compressed Texture Format 24Bit Z-Buffer Depth GLEXCESS5 1024x768 Resolution Scene 1 Intro Scene 2 Waver Scene 3 Facescape Scene 4 Exploding Logo

QUAKE HERCULES 3DPROPHET 4500 KYRO2 294 202 135 ELSA GLADIAC 511 GEFORCE2 MX 400 314 182 120 640x480 800x600 1024x768 BENCHMARK SETTINGS GLQuake v1.13a Full Screen Size COMMENT - "We have decided to test both video cards with new and old games, mostly to show compatibility with older titles rather than performance. Both video cards perform very well which is to be expected, the Elsa GeForce2 MX wins the low resolution test while the Hercules 4500 Kyro2 wins both of the higher resolution tests."

QUAKE 2 HERCULES 3DPROPHET 4500 KYRO2 251 205 138 ELSA GLADIAC 511 GEFORCE2 MX 400 237 171 109 640x480 800x600 1024x768 BENCHMARK SETTINGS 3dnow OpenGL Driver Demo1.dm2 benchmark Fullscreen enabled Texture Quality Full 8Bit Textures Disabled Sync Every Frame Disabled COMMENT - "Quake II is a more demanding than Quake and this shows in it's scores especially at higher resolution. Once again both video cards performed very well however the Hercules 4500 Kyro2 was able to deliver better performance at all of the resolutions."