The Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 is like a breath of fresh air in the mainstream market segment dominated almost completely by NVIDIA’s GeForce 2 MX. Whether or not the Kyro II will be successful is basically a matter of image (no pun intended), since the real profit is in OEM sales, meaning pre-built systems. It remains to be seen if any OEMs are willing to risk fouling up their relationship with NVIDIA to try a new card, or if ST Micro can convince any OEM to do so. As far as performance is concerned, the Kyro II beats the MX hands down and is even close on the heels of the much more expensive GeForce 2GTS and ATi RADEON DDR. On top of that, the 3D Prophet 4500 offers better image quality than the competition thanks to its internal 32Bit rendering and makes an impressive showing in the FSAA department as well.

The only thing that could bring this card down is the looming danger of incompatibility. If you’re interested in buying this card, you should be aware that you might not always get every game / program to work on the first try. This problem is not specific to the Prophet 4500, though – it is shared by all non-NVIDIA cards. After all, most game designers are currently developing their games with an NVIDIA card in mind as a lowest common denominator. Since Hercules introduced this card to almost all important developers at the Game Developers Conference in March and since compatibility is taken very seriously (remember the AGP 2x issue), this shouldn’t be overemphasized though. Almost all games used during testing here at RS ran flawlessly, with the sole exception of Evolva’s Dot-3 bump mapping test.