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By,
Marco "BigWop"
Chiappetta
July 12, 2001
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Hot Hardware's Athlon Test System |
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1.0GHz. of Power |
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1000MHz AMD Athlon
(T-Bird - 7.5 X 133)
MSI K7T266 Pro-R (VIA
KT266)
256MB PC2100 Crucial
DDR RAM (2-2-2)
Hercules 3D Prophet
4500
Sound Blaster Live!
Windows Millennium
DirectX 8.0A
Driver Revision:
7.114
Comparison Card:
Leadtek GF2 GTS 64MB
DDR
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Benchmarks with
the 3D Prophet 4500 |
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DirectX and Video up First... |
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To test the 3D Prophet
4500's video playback performance and quality, we
ran MadOnion's Video 2000.
VIDEO
2000:
The 3D Prophet scores a
few hundred points lower than its competition in
Video 2000. On a similar test system, GeForce
2 MXs score approximately 2300 Video marks. We
were a little disappointed with this relatively low
score. We did play some DVDs, however, and
were satisfied with the quality.
Next up we have some
DirectX benchmarks using 3D Mark 2000 & 2001, also
from MadOnion...
3D
MARK 2000 & 2001:
3D Mark 2000 is a
DirectX 7 benchmark. For the sake of
comparison we've included some numbers posted by the
Leadtek Enhanced GF2 GTS is a recent review.
Notice that the Kyro II outscores the GeForce 2 GTS
at every resolution, even without hardware transform
and lighting acceleration and with a much lower
fillrate. There is a reason for this...
The Kyro II's "low"
fillrate (350 MPixels) is very misleading. The
main benefit of Tile based rendering is that only
visible pixels are rendered. This is important
because every 3D image contains a certain amount of
"overdraw".
Think of a 3D cube being
rendered on screen. At any given time, only 3
sides of the cube are visible. Traditional
renderers "draw" the entire cube, even though only 3
sides are visible...wasting bandwidth rendering the
3 sides that are hidden. With the Kyro II's
tile based rendering system, only the visible sides
of the cube are rendered...using 50% less bandwidth
than traditional rendering. So not only is the
"effective" fillrate much higher, but it requires
much less memory bandwidth, which is why the
standard SDRAM is more than adequate.
Another feature helping
the Kyro II pull ahead of the GTS is its ability to
do 8-Layer multitexturing in a single pass.
This ability eliminates the need for geometry data
to be "re-sent" to memory for multiple passes,
further decreasing the memory bandwidth used to
render complicated scenes. Next up, 3D Mark
2001.
In 3D Mark 2001,which is
a DirectX 8 benchmark, the 3D Prophet 4500 performs
admirably. We suspect the lack of hardware T&L
and other DX8 features is holding the card back
though. However, these scores are not
terrible. Perhaps with further driver
optimization we will see better performance from the
Kyro II.
.gif)
Some OpenGL
Benchmarking... |
