Image quality
The Kyro II's implementation of deferred rendering produces unimpeachable results. Using the card, you'd never know that what's going on inside the chip is so radically different from everything else. That's no mean feat, considering the Kyro II must process API calls intended for conventional graphics chips and handle them seamlessly.

Standing on deck, you'd never know it was a three-legged dwarf rowing the boat.

The image quality is on a par with any of its more conventional rivals, and in many cases, the Kyro II's output looks cleaner and sharper to my eye. Imagination Tech's claims about higher precision for pixel blending rings true. I swear I can see the difference at times; transparencies just look cleaner.

Serious Sam looks amazing on the 3D Prophet 4500

The PowerVR hype machine spends a lot of time talking about "internal true color" with reference to 16-bit color rendering. The basic gist of it is this: the chip renders everything internally at 32 bits, even when it's using a 16-bit color video mode. But why would anyone ever use 16-bit color mode on this thing? The Kyro sports loads of pixel-pushing power, so why bother?

Anyhow, the Kyro's output is quite nice. Compliments to the dwarf.

The usual suspects, minus a few
Beyond the radical new approach to 3D rendering, the Kyro II endows the 3D Prophet 4500 with most of the features you might expect to see in a new graphics card. Texture compression, dot-product and environmental bump mapping, and anisotropic filtering are all there. Conspicuous by its absence: a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine. The Kyro II chip has to rely on the host CPU and good drivers to handle T&L chores. We've noted above that deferred rendering saves on some lighting work, though, so that may not matter so much. (Is T&L necessary? Wumpus asked the same question a while back.)

The chip also lacks even a primitive form of the pixel and vertex shaders found in next-gen graphics chips like the GeForce3 and the upcoming ATI R200. Like all previous 3D chips, the Kyro II will be left high and dry once DirectX 8 applications (and their OpenGL counterparts) hit the market in force. That's a ways off, however, and presently, a GeForce3 card costs three to four times what the 3D Prophet 4500 does. Save your money now, and you can upgrade to something better when the time comes—maybe even a Kyro 3.

The flat stuff
The 3D Prophet 4500 works just about like any other AGP card when it comes to basic text and windowed displays. I have noticed a couple of things that stand out, though—one good and one bad.

First, the bad news: the 3D Prophet 4500 has one of the dimmest signal outputs of any graphics card I have (and I have a lot of 'em). Plug it into a monitor adjusted for another card, and white background looks gray, the colors washed out. It's not the end of the world; crank up the brightness and contrast on a good monitor, and the problem disappears. In the grand scheme, it's a subtle difference. But not everyone—and especially not everyone buying a budget video card—has a really good monitor.

I mentioned this concern to Hercules, and they swapped out my test card for a new one. The second card's output was just like the first's. This is probably an issue with the Kyro II chip's integrated RAMDAC and with the initial brightness and contrast settings in the Kyro drivers. I suggested to Hercules that brightness and contrast sliders in their drivers might help mitigate the problem, and right afterwards, I installed the latest Kyro drivers. Lo and behold, they'd just incorporated a gamma slider. The gamma adjustments help, but contrast controls would still be a welcome addition.

In all, the 4500 is a decent enough 2D display card, but those of you who will accept only the highest quality signal output (especially those with gigantic monitors) would do well to consider a Radeon instead.

Second, I gave the 4500's DVD playback a workout, to see how it stacked up. I was surprised both by the quality of the playback and by its extra-low CPU utilization. On a 1.33GHz Athlon, the system reported between three and fifteen percent CPU use with CyberLink's PowerDVD software. I'm not clear on the finer points on the Kyro II's DVD decode assist capabilities, but it's as good as anything else I've seen—especially in terms of CPU use.

In all, the Kyro II chip has the basic, non-3D graphics functions covered quite well. No "gotchas" reared their ugly heads during my testing.