New Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 with Kyro 2 ............ !

[CorCentral]

http://www.rivastation.com/prophet4500_prev_e.htm

 

[rickn]

to bad there aint anything new in it. It will be a good low cost videocard with decent performance. Certainly no contender against ATI or Nvidia, but for the price it shouldn't be to bad

 

[Killrose]

I hope it's decent, we need more players in the video card market to keep our prices down.

 

[UKtaxman]

To be fair, there is very, very little spec wise known on this chip. Apart from the fact that it is 0.18 andf 175mhz, they aren't giving too much away. All the sites I've seen today have only speculated that it has no t&l or FSAA4free.
Even without either it is still a card to way beat GF2gts. But if they did surprise us then WAHEY! I don't think Hercules would use this chip if it was crap. Also rumours are that Creative and Elsa are also signed up for Kyro2 chips!

 

[Soccerman]

I suspect that it's simply a normal Kyro with higher clock. The Kyro 2 will include T&L methinks.

 

[rickn]

That is the Kyro 2. the 4500 will not have T&L, the STG-5000 or STG-5500 will have T&L, it wont be out til later this year

 

[vss1980]

Yeah, this is just the same old Kyro but faster. Considering that the 125MHz version only had a real fill-rate of nearly 250 Mtexels/sec, at a clock speed of 175MHz, we should be looking at around 333 Mtexels/sec and that is provided there are no internal design changes.

If that is the case this should sit around and between the performance area of a Geforce256 DDR card a Radeon DDR card, considering that the effective fill-rate can at times be up to 4x higher using Tile rendering.

Technically it will be as good as before, but if they keep the cost down, this could be an impressive card for decent money.

 

[UKtaxman]

Initial retail for the Hercules is $149. It has some really interesting features take a look at this http://www.st.com/stonline/prodpres/graphic/kyro/32.htm
Thats the equivalent of over 4gigapixels of fill rate from a conventional processor!!!!!!!!
also
http://www.st.com/stonline/prodpres/graphic/kyro/multi.htm
Now thats 8x multitexturing!!!!!
It is actually looking quite impressive. However theres no direct mention anywhere of whether this will include FSAA4free, although it does hint at it. If it does then this will be a killer card at that price(take note Nvidia).

 

[BFG10K]

By far the biggest news is the fact that the core is now clocked at 175 MHz versus the old 125 MHz core. I expect the Kyro 2 will be much faster than the original Kyro, and I can't wait to see benchmarks of it.

 

[Weyoun]

I've always had a keen eye on the Kyro cards. With future games the gap between deffered renderers and traditionals will only widen as the overdraw gets larger, and I really like the idea of an efficient computer Then again, since when was my computer ever efficient, it's running win2k and im feeling the crunch of having only 128MB of RAM oh well, another 128MB for $71AU cant be too bad that's about $35-40US i think

We'll also be promoting the underdog of the situation, as ATI and nVidia are sitting on piles of money bigger than my house and the dragons are only getting fatter. Even if it isn't fully DX8 compatible (what a card if it was...) i'd still consider buying one I say good on PowerVR for finally getting it right

 

[Daemon_UK]

Theres a Q3 bench on rivastation

Quake 3 3D Prophet 4500
Normal 800x600 99,4
Normal 1024x768 89,4
Normal 1280x1024 62,2
Normal 1600x1200 41,7
HQ+Max Tex 800x600 95,3 108,4 101,4
HQ+Max Tex 1024x768 79,0 91.8 78,6
HQ+Max Tex 1280x1024 52,3 60.1 51.3
HQ+Max Tex 1600x1200 35,1 39.3 36.3

3D Mark 2000 v1.1 default benchmark (1024x768-16) scored 5225

Hows this compare to the GTS?

Edit found uptodate eVGA Geforce 2 GTS Review @ nvnews
GTS2 Scores are in bold.

Edit2 found Radeon 64 DDR scores Radeon Scores
Radeon Scores are in italics.

I think what we need is Anandtech to do a review, and lets see how it stacks on a 1GHZ platform!

 

[Hanky]

Well, the 3D Mark is worse than what a Geforce DDR would get with T&L enabled. Anyway, the 3D Prophet 4500 has no T&L and a Geforce DDR w/o T&L would score worse, so it seems as if the new 3D Prophet has to be rated slightly above a Geforce DDR.

 

[Hanky]

I'm more worried about the RAMDAC...could be a problem with only 270 MHz...or not?

 

[Daemon_UK]

Hank, I tend to disagree. Im not sure if I have got all the right scores from the right sources,

However, if you see the scores, the KYRO does the same as the RADEON 64 DDR and the Geforce 64 GTS.

Not too shabby for a low budget card. I'm gonna wait for the T+L Verison, then I'll pick one up myself.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

It's almost the same performance as a gts and it's real cheap sound good to me.

 

[rickn]

no T&L is a real drawback, especially in the longevity department. It looks like it will be a great entry level videocard

 

[UKtaxman]

I dissagree. t&l isn't really a drawback at the moment. Also longevity wise it is far better than any GF2. The HSR, defered rendering technique actually means it will perform better with future games. As the complexity of 3d increases, so does the performance.

 

[rickn]

<< t&amp;l isn't really a drawback at the moment >>



T&amp;L is a buzzword. Helps to sell product.



<< defered rendering technique actually means it will perform better with future games. As the complexity of 3d increases, so does the performance >>



PowerVR fanatics have been spouting that same jibberish since PCX1, and it aint happened yet.

 

[DaveB3D]

Q3 is a really poor game to use if you want to compare KYRO to anything. Carmack does a much better job at killing depth complexity with the engine. Look at it like this though: If KYRO comes comes to the GTS in Q3, it will pretty well waste it in almost anything else.

 

[Teasy]

&quot;PowerVR fanatics have been spouting that same jibberish since PCX1, and it aint happened yet&quot;

Hasn't it? look at those numbers Kyro II with a 350mpixel/s, 350mtexel/s fillrate and 2.8gb mem bandwidth keeping up with a card that has a fillrate of 800mpixels/s, 1600mtexels/s and 6.4gb mem bandwidth, and this is in a game that uses some software HSR, and you saying that tile based rendering isn't making the difference that people have said it will make?, look at a Kyro review and you'll see that against the MX in anything but high res the kyro's around the same speed maybe a little slower in Q3 (faster at high res though), then look at another game bench in that review and you'll almost certainly see the Kyro take the lead, thats because other game don't even try to use software HSR like Q3 does, if those scores are right then the Kyro II will own the GTS and Radeon DDR in most games and hold a much steadier framerate to boot.

Now lets think about FSAA, again if those numbers are right then the Kyro II will soundly beat both the GTS and Radeon DDR with FSAA enabled.

Also I've just heard that Hercules will release a Kyro card at around the same time as the Kyro II board for $80.

BTW I see allot of people referring to the kyro as a 125mhz chip, it was infact 115mhz.

 

[rickn]

Well, those comparisons are not very convincing since the Kyro 2 benchmarks are running on a 1ghz cpu while the Ultra scores are on a 719mhz cpu and the Radeon scores on an Athlon 750mhz cpu.

Do side by side comparisons of all cards on a 1ghz cpu and then show me. It is almost as if I am the only one who notices.



<< On Kyro 2's performance,
CGO mentioned the numbers the card has been performing at with Quake 3:

&quot;So how fast is it? We'll wait until we have our own card to test under controlled conditions before disclosing benchmarks, but we were on-hand at Hercules and ST Micro's press event and managed to run a few Quake III timedemos on a 1.2 GHz Athlon. At 1024x768 in 32-bit color with every option cranked up and texture compression disabled, it turned out a score of about 54 frames per second. >>


Cdmag

That is ok, but on my P3 966mhz cpu, Radeon 64mb DDR at default I get 64fps with everything maxed and no texture compression. This is on demo127 BTW

 

[vss1980]

rickn,

I'm sure you were quite impressed with the possible speed increases offered by beta nVidia and 3dfx drivers that implemented (buggy) HSR functionality, sometimes scoring results that were nearly 100% faster.

Here we have a graphics card with the fill-rate of a TNT2 yet offering performance that in some cases betters a GF2 MX.

I am in a fortunate position to have seen the difference between a TNT2 and Geforce2 MX on the same PC and there is more than a noticeable difference.

Also, the Neon250 (previous product before Kyro) had a fill-rate which was around the same area as the Savage4 (certainly less than a TNT) and yet was able to beat the TNT2 Ultra in a few benchmarks.

Tile-based rendering is definitely more efficient, but you also have to remember the benefits haven't been seen as there have been no bandwidth limits of brute force available to conventional renderers until now.

 

[rickn]

I never said it was a bad product. There is no question about it that tile based rendering is a better approach to 3d. I do not like that it doesnt have more DX8 features. I will reserve final judgement when the reviews start coming in and I get some more 1st hand comments from new users.

 

[BFG10K]

I concur with Dave's comment. UT and Quake 3 aren't really good games to show off what the Kyro is capable of, since they essentially already do in software some of what the Kyro does in hardware (ie remove overdraw).

 

[Daemon_UK]

I think the benches we got are wrong for the KYRO II! Below are using the Vivid Kyro!!

http://www.mitrax.de/reviews/vivid/mark.htm (use babelfish to translate!)

3D MARK 2000 1.1,
Athlon TBird 1210Mhz, 110 FSB.
1024x768x16 = 5234

PIII 864, 124 FSB.
1024x768x16 = 4026

PIII 1000. rivastation
1024x768x16 = 5225

I could be wrong, can someone else check this out for me??

or should I be laying off the CRACK PIPE?