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Graphics

WHILE THE KYRO 2 is a very good card on price and performance, every path has its puddle, and there's no rose without a thorn. Just like Nvidia had some problems with its early Riva 128 and TNT cards in games like Unreal, and like ATI used to have major problems with its Radeon cards through using "immature drivers", Kyro 2 has some Max Payne issues with its latest drivers. I must admit that Kyro 2 is really capable of swallowing Max Payne and is very playable one, but there are some imperfections.
Even with Patch Version 1.1, Kyro 2 with the latest drivers can suffer serious slow downs, with texture breaks, at which point the game becomes practically unplayable and therefore not a game at all. The error occurs when you go into some open spaces with lots of snow and in some rooms as well. This can easily lead you to an early death as the frame rate drops dramatically to � 5- 10 FPS. I am sure that these things can be worked out, but at this point Kyro 2 owners desperately need some driver update or game fix. This is one of the normal things that any company needs to overcome to become a leader and we hope that PoverVR has the knowledge and strength to make this happen. TI has already managed it in a way, but still need some polishing with its drives and Max Payne works OK with Radeon. Maybe we'll see a driver update any day now.

A new "trend" appeared since SDRAM has become more than cheap: graphic cards manufacturers are building 64MB of memory into the cards that actually need no more than a half of it. There is a logical question: is it just marketing, or it is justified to invest some more money and get the additional 32MB of memory in local? Let's find out if such an investment can be economically justified.

Is 32MB enough for me?

First they have driven us crazy with abnormally expensive GeForce 3 model, and then they put us back on the ground for a while. The prices of DDR and especially SDR memory, have gone unbelievably down during last 6 months. Still, DDR models of graphic cards kept their prices almost unchanged, like there is no trend of becoming cheaper for them. Someone may cite the fact that graphic cards' memory has much more quality (i.e. speed) than memory inside our systems. But even then, consider how much memory you have inside your system, and how much on your graphic card. At this moment, some usual ratio is 4:1, or even 8:1 (256MB in system : 32MB on card). Yet, the total price of all that memory is half cheaper than the price of some good graphic card. Software that will use more than 32MB of textures per scene (games mostly, of course) is being announced every day and that would mean that standard video cards could become almost useless. Software manufacturers will, of course, avoid making over-demanding games for the sake of their profits. Optimization sometimes goes to such extent that even previous generation video cards are able of processing certain games (Electronic Arts, id Software), but hardcore gamers will always want to get the maximum out of the games they play. Why would designers go through so much trouble in making beautiful games if all they got at the and was visual degradation of their "master pieces". I like to play games sometimes and when I do I want everything to look the best it can - just the way authors wanted me to. Hercules and some other video card manufacturers thought about this kind of people, so they released, even before games with enormous and various textures hit the market, the most sold versions of their graphics cards with some "extra" memory. I dare to say before we go through some test that this move should be welcomed. Games that need 64MB of memory are already here. "For extreme level of details and hyper-realistic textures, you'll need at least 64MB of memory on your video card". Similar sentence was found in the video setup of various games I came across recently.

The box is made in classical Prophet style - it is black, nice and big. It contains well known CD that we already got with Hercules' Prophet MX400 model. Stickers are also there, as well as high-quality user's manual in several languages. Since there is no TV-out on the card, you will not find any cables or additional software inside the box.

Hercules does not give up its beautiful color. This card is therefore made on high-quality, sky blue PCB. Aluminum heatsink is painted in some lighter shade. It looks standard (like on many MX models), but it fits in really well. There is no fan, like on 32MB model, which means that the cooling is passive. 64MB of memory are placed in standard 8MB modules, made in Samsung/Infenion sites. Their speed is 6ns, which is quite expected if we consider this card's price and the amount of memory. Like most of you already know, 6ns corresponds to 166MHz speeds. However, the memory on our specimen was clocked a bit higher, but "usually the fastest" Hercules already got us used to that. A larger number of memory modules caused the larger size of this card. If we compare its dimensions with Microstar's MX, we must conclude that Microstar's card is slightly bigger. However, if we compare this Hercules with the famous Prophet MX 32MB model, we will notice that 64MB model is almost twice as big! So, Hercules has the smallest and the biggest model in its offer.