Prophet 4500 Drivers of the Future?

[denisetrac]

At least twice, I've found references here to anticipated new drivers from Hercules for the Prophet 4500 Kyro II chipset. Includeing one thread that sounded somewhat well informed about the "Black Opal" folks, whoever they are. Does any really expect the next Hercules drivers to fix the problems with CMBO? I've seen articles that say Hercules is putting out 65,000 of these cards. (Nvidia has a nice anti-KyroII piece on the TomsHardware site.) Do the Battlefront and Hercules folks actually talk?

I don't want to yank out the board I just put in, but is there any point in waiting?

Can someone from the publisher of CMBO respond to this?

[Schrullenhaft]

I noticed that you dug up all of the Kyro-related posts on this board.

I don't have personal access to a Hercules Prophet 4000/4500 nor am I an employee of BTS. Madmatt is the actual person at BTS responsible for customer/technical support. He has had contact with a number of video card/chipset manufacturers in the past, but I don't know if he has any developer-level contacts at Hercules.

The Kyro II video chip is actually manufactured by ST Microelectronics (who provided foundry services early in 3dfx's history and even did some work for NVidia too). I don't know if Hercules is co-developing the drivers with the ST Micro team or if they are just working on an OEM level and doing minor work on Reference drivers supplied by ST Micro. Hercules is currently the largest OEM for the Kyro II (and may remain so for quite some time) so the driver development may be shared between them and ST Micro. ST Micro unfortunately isn't posting any Reference drivers on their primary commercial site.

Anyway... considering some of the issues with the current drivers, a new driver may be necessary to fix the problems. However the 'next driver' still may not fix the text problems within CM; that may take awhile (but hopefully it will get addressed soon in some manner). A regsitry hack is all that is available now and it is an incomplete fix (as you've discovered). Have you checked the registry itself for the key settings to see if they are applied correctly or not. I know one of the threads you dug up listed some settings that someone had some success with (though I don't know the exactly quality of the fix or the performance thereof).

Here's a web-page with some useful hints. It probably covers the same ground that the registry patches do. You may want to disable the FSAA from this control panel tab for CM.

3D Spotlight on PowerVR Kyro II:

http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/kyro2/kyro-2.shtml

[ 08-20-2001: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[denisetrac]

Thank you very much Schrullenhaft. Yes I did scour the board and I do hope MadMax will shed some light on any Hercules contacts he may or may not have had. My old TNT2 was second hand when I got it. I see a GeForce2 GTS 32mbDDR for $90 and may go that route. It probably won't be up to part with the 4500, but at least I'll be able to play CMBO again which I really enjoy. Is the MX400 above or below the GTS? Thank you again for any advice or thoughts on this.

[Schrullenhaft]

The GeForce2 MX (MX400 series) will be below the GeForce2 GTS in performance as far as I'm aware. There will be a GeForce3 MX coming out in a few days (or months depending on how hard it is to actually get one), but I'm not sure of the price (I'd guess at US$150-180) or its actual performance.

Here's some websites with a comparison (that is a bit dated, but it may give you some ideas if your shopping around):

http://www.3dgrafikkarten.de/comparison_e.php3

This Anandtech thread also lists several sites for more video info:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?threadid=495400&catid=31