Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB - KYRO II (1/15)
"They never knew what hit them..." is a pretty fair description of the secretive development and recent unveiling of PowerVR's new Kyro II chip in the form of Hercules' 3D Prophet 4500. The chip itself is not really a new development, as it is based on the original Kyro (1), which, although never hugely popular, turned enough heads to be regarded as a promising design. Its comparatively low clockspeed of "only" 115 MHz hampered it's competitiveness with contemporary offerings by NVIDIA, ATi and 3dfx. Another handicap was Power VR's inability to sign any of the larger cardmakers to produce a Kyro line of cards.
Hercules has now stepped up to change this. ST Microelectronics produces the Kyro II on an 0.18µ process, allowing it to run at a more up-to-date 175 MHz. What really makes this chip special is its unique architecture - the Kyro is a so called tile-based renderer, or Tiler. This rendering technique, whose bandwidth-saving benefits we will cover in more detail further on in this article, literally puts it in a class of its own, setting it apart from all other current designs by NVIDIA or ATi. Our benchmarks show that a 149$ 3DProphet 4500 equipped with 64 MB of SDRAM on a 128Bit bus easily beats a GeForce 2 MX and can sometimes even best the more expensive GeForce2 GTS - despite the lack of a T&L unit and 4x AGP support. But more on that later. |
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Copyright: 09.04.2001 -
RIVA
Station 2001 - Lars Weinand Translation by Benjamin Kraft URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/3dprophet4500-64mb_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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