The newborn Kyro II has its growing pains. The overall visual quality of the chipset is good but not stellar. My subjective impression is that both the Matrox and ATI Radeon chips deliver better 2D sharpness, brilliance and color saturation. The card held its 2D sharpness through the top 1600x1200 resolutions, however, and most images and windows remained snappy until the highest resolutions, when screen redraws became obvious. Like the rest of the 2D performance, DVD rendering was totally acceptable but not as sharp and detailed as we get from our Radeons.

There were unexplained anomalies in this chip set that may be attributable to early drivers. We experienced visible screen redraw effects in some video modes, despite setting the card to a high refresh rate. This occurred with the id logo screen in Q3A at very high resolutions, and it was visible in some scenes in Max Payne. MDK2 kept wanting to load into a minimized window and only went to full screen after regular prodding. Adjustments to the gamma slider also didn't always take hold properly. This became irritating because the card's default gamma in many 3D games, like Alice, seemed too dark. And finally, the card did not appreciate task-switching from a 3D game to the 2D desktop. That common task distorted both game and desktop on several occasions.

For anti-aliasing fans, the Prophet II 4500 will just barely satisfy their strange need for fuzzier, but straighter, edges. Like the GeForce2 generation of cards, the Kyro II chipset takes a sizeable performance hit from anti-aliasing. In Q3A, for instance, the 4X AA effect made the framerates drop from 141 in 640x480 to 72, from 135 to 47 in 800x600.

While not perfect, and certainly in need of better Kyro II drivers, the Hercules Prophet 4500 is a clear price/performance leader for the mid-range of available 3D cards. It will drive most contemporary games with glass smooth framerates at 1024x768 resolutions and higher, which is enough for most mortal gamers. All in all, Hercules and STMicroelectronics have produced a refreshing bargain alternative to higher priced cards.

Pros

• Price
• Great speed for the price even at higher resolutions
• 64MB of Ram on a bargain card
• 2D/3D/DVD visual quality on par with current NVIDIA cards

Cons

• Driver glitches
• Driver adjustments needed
• Visible redrawing in some scenes