Sizing it up
Our test suite was not kind to the 3D Prophet 4500. In Quake III and Serious Sam, the 4500 held up quite well. The Kyro II chip was huffin' and puffin' in most of the rest of the tests. That's not an unexpected result, because our test suite is heavy on polygons and next-gen 3D features. It's intended to push graphics cards to their limits, expose their soft underbellies, and give 'em a tweak. At 175MHz, with a three-legged dwarf below deck rowing for all he's worth, we knew the 3D Prophet 4500 had a few seams in its armor.

But let's not overlook its strengths. In the tests that matter most to today's gamers, at intermediate resolutions and in antialiasing modes, the 3D Prophet 4500 managed to match the GeForce2 with regularity and beat out the Radeon more often than not. Subjectively, it was faster than my 32MB GeForce2 GTS in all of the games I played. That's a heck of an accomplishment for a card with such a miserly hardware spec.

More than that, this card inspires confidence. For the most part, it just works right, and its drivers never once rendered my PC unbootable (which is more than I can say for the Radeon) or caused a system crash. With its smaller transistor count, I also found the 3D Prophet 4500 caused less trouble for me in my PC, whose fast Athlon and full complement of PCI cards has left it a bit jumpy about power. Even with a nice 400W power supply, a GeForce3 or GeForce2 Ultra can make it fussy about booting up. With the 3D Prophet card, things were a bit less hairy. Not everyone will be affected by such problems with other graphics cards, but the Kyro's teensy size and power requirements are a plus in certain situations.

Still, the 3D Prophet 4500 is most impressive because of the technology behind it. As a showcase for Imagination Tech's PowerVR technology, it's downright exciting. The fundamental ideas behind the Kyro's tile-based rendering method are very solid, and the implementation ain't bad, either.

As a video card, the 3D Prophet 4500 isn't quite up to par with the mid-range cards from NVIDIA and ATI. That's a shame, because if the Kyro II could be mated with the DDR memory and high clock speeds of its primary competitors, it'd blow them away—at least in terms of fill rate. As it stands, it's a TNT2-spec card that sometimes shows its weaknesses. High-polygon scenes and programs that use the latest and greatest 3D features tend to strain the card. Yes, it's much more efficient, but in worst-case scenarios, it just doesn't have the oomph to overcome what finesse can't.

This card is an excellent budget video card, however, and a great baseline for graphics accelerators. It'd make a GeForce2 MX 400 break out into cold sweats. So long as Hercules keeps the cutting the price with regularity—and with this hardware spec, that ought to be easy—the 3D Prophet 4500 will go on my recommended list for all of my cheapskate friends. I'd like nothing better than to see the same thing happen in the OEM market, to save me from that creepy feeling I get walking by the shelves full of 1.3GHz Pentium 4 systems with TNT2 M64 cards at Best Buy. With cards like this one around, there's just no excuse for committing the TNT2 M64 sin, even for the most frugal PC manufacturers.