· Lowest cost of all cards tested
· Full OpenGL and D3D gaming support
· 3D performance mediocre to poor
· No TV-Out or DVD support, even though the Savage3D does natively support these features
· Poor software bundle
The Hercules Terminator Beast is currently the only video card available that's based on the Savage3D chip from S3. We wonder if in their rush to be the first to market with the new chip, if Hercules is asking the public to be their "beta test" group for the Beast, as our testing period was difficult and problem filled.
We say this because the Beast easily had the most "issues" for us to overcome to achieve the scores in the benchmark results section of this comparison. In fact, even though the Beast has been on the market for close to a month now, a BIOS flash was just made available from Hercules last Friday, forcing us to retest the card completely in order to provide accurate results.
Seem suspicious to you? It did to us, but Hercules assures us that the Beast has encountered only average levels of calls into their tech-support center, and is currently well within their projected figures.
In any case, the Beast offers a fair level of performance when compared to its low $90 - $100 cost, but still performs worse than four other cards in this roundup. In order to achieve such a low cost on the Beast, some of the features that the Savage3D chip supports have been left on the Hercules manufacturing plant floor, including TV-Out, and DVD support.
The drivers for the Beast are maturing nicely (there have been three sets made available since the card debuted) and the general visual quality of the card is good in 2D and 3D on average.
Since the Beast supports OpenGL through the drivers that ship with it, it makes it a better buy for the gamer than the Matrox Mystique G200 does, and it does of course support the highly-covered texture compression technique pioneered by S3 and included in DX6.
The Beast is a good card.....for its $100 price. Otherwise it's outclassed by the performance-heavies in the rest of this field.
