Installation
I removed the GeForce 2 card from my system and installed the Prophet 4500 in its place, Then to ensure a clean benchmarking environment I did a clean install of Windows. Once Windows was installed it asked for the drivers for a standard PCI VGA card on putting the Supplied Driver CD it was simply a matter of browsing to the driver CD. The Drivers are on the root directory of the CD and installed without a problem, so that part was as easy as you could expect.The drivers supplied on the CD are pretty recent drivers version 7.89, I searched around on the internet there are now some newer drivers available from the Hercules website. I've included screen shots of the Kyro II control panel, as they are a little different to the now pretty standard Nvidia drivers. Instead of lots of different screen shots I've included the control applets as animated Gif so please be patient whilst they load.
Here is the first applet allowing control of the D3D and OpenGL settings along with refresh rate and picture size
The Gif is 75kb, so it shouldn't take long to load
It's a little different to the Nvidia Control Panel I'm used to but there are lots of settings to play with, I didn't actually touch any of them much because most of the games I tried seemed to work fine anyway. The only thing I did do was to turn off Vsync in the custom options, I did this for both D3D and OpenGL.
The Hercules Prophet 4500, has a relatively slow RAMDAC this means that the really high refresh rates in high resolutions aren't available, this isn't to much of any issue to me as I rarely run over a 75Hz refresh rate but to some people higher refresh rates are important. I've written a list of the refresh rates I was able to achieve with the card, they differ somewhat from what's on the box.
| 640*480 | 150Hz |
| 800*600 | 120Hz |
| 1024*768 | 100Hz |
| 1280*1024 | 85Hz |
| 1600*1200 | 72Hz |
At the upper resolution of my monitor I only managed 72Hz. With the GeForce 2 I was able to get up to 75Hz @ 1600*1200 resolution, the other refresh rates reached the limits of my cheapish 19" monitor. At the lower Resolution of 640*480 I was able to Achieve 150Hz refresh rate which exceeds the specs on the box (O:.
Well that's enough of the specs for now lets see what the performance is like.
