Hercules 3D Prophet 4500

The Hercules 3D Prophet 4500
Kyro II Powered Goodness...

By, Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta
July 12, 2001

Time for some in-game OpenGL testing...
 

Quake 3 Arena Testing Do you need Hardware T&L?

QUAKE 3 ARENA:

We ran Quake 3's built-in timedemo Demo001 at a variety of settings to assess the 3D Prophet 4500's OpenGL gaming performance.  First up is the "Fastest" setting.

Keep in mind, Quake 3's "Fastest" setting isn't to visually appealing.  Nonetheless 75 FPS at 1600x1200x16 is nothing to sneeze at considering this card's low price and excellent 16 Bit output.  Let's raise the bar a bit though.

At the "Normal" setting, notice the sharp performance drop, especially at higher resolutions.  Quake 3 still remains perfectly playable all the way up to 1280x1024.

Quake 3's "High Quality" raises the bar even further, yet still remains playable up to 1280x1024.  For the absolute best image quality, FSAA must be enabled.  We left Quake 3 set to "High Quality" and at 1024x768, tested the three different FSAA methods available...

Enabling FSAA at this resolution really brought the 3D Prophet 4500 to it's knees.  If you've got your heart set on gaming with FSAA, 800x600 is probably you best bet.

Overclocking The 3D Prophet 4500 Nothing Major Goin' On...

Although the 3D Prophet 4500 performs very well at it's default core and memory speeds, we're sure some of you will try to eek more performance from your boards by overclocking...

We used Powerstrip to overclock our 3D Prophet 4500.  Unfortunately, we were only able to hit a maximum speed of 183MHz, which yielded very small performance gains. 

 More OpenGL and the Conclusion....