3D Prophet

I just found a 3D prophet 4000 in an old box I had lying around. I was wondering what this card would be equivilent to as far as known stuff like GF 1?

I actually found this:
http://www.gamevortex.com/gamevortex/hard_rev.php/3

Says it is close to the GF 4?

That cant be right can it?

Nandro said:

I actually found this:
http://www.gamevortex.com/gamevortex/hard_rev.php/3

Says it is close to the GF 4?

That cant be right can it?

Click to expand...

no, but his wording is a little confusing... here are his 3dmark 2001 numbers:

This benchmarking software puts the card through some rigorous graphics tests. Acceptable scores for today's games range from 500 (lower GeForce2 cards) upwards to 3000 ( GeForce4 Ti4600). The 3DP4XT got a super commendable score of 1498.

Click to expand...

in a table it'd look like this:
GeForce2 - 500
3D Prophet 4000 XT - 1500
GeForce4 Ti4600 - 3000

so it would seem it's half as good as this particular geforce4...

EDIT: so i looked up cards that scored half as well as a GeForce4 Ti4600 through tomshardware's vga charts (http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-03.html#unreal_tournament_2003) and found the closest equivalents to this card would likely be nVidia's GeForce FX 5200, or ATI's Radeon 9000 pro (using the ut2k3 chart)

regarding its realworld performance, even though the review reads like an advertisement, i'd take the reviewers advice that it can play games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein pretty well when all options are cranked up, since that guy did have this card in his machine and ran those games (even if he didn't give us fps for either).

Thenagain, if you've got the card in your hands there's no better way to find out if its any good for any given application than to try it out yourself (and then let us know )

I suppose I could, but my rig is all set up for water cooling and its a real pain to remove the stuff to test a card I will never use. I have a GF 2 GTS Turbo I use as a backup now. I was just wondering what it was like. I'll probably sell it for $15 or something.

glad i could help then... good luck on your sale

Actually I may try it out just to see. What ever happened to that series of card? The technology was no good?

well i've never heard of the card till you brought it up... maybe a lack of advertising?

Ah, that was a decent card back when it was new. Got a Kyro2 in my pile over here.

ST Micro simply couldn't compete with Nvidia and ATI, even though they had an arguably superior product for the price (even the more costly ones). The eventually sold off their GPU division I believe. I forget to who.

That series of card had a pretty cool technology built in. I cant remember exactly what it was called, but instead of rendering the whole map/area/world all the time, it only rendered what needed to be seen which gave it a pretty good performance increase at the time. I may have worded everything wrong but I think that you get the picture of what I am trying to point out. They where descent cards but I believe that they are only DX7 compliant so it would be hard to compare them to anything other than a GF2 GT or ultra.

Nandro said:

Actually I may try it out just to see. What ever happened to that series of card? The technology was no good?

Click to expand...

Hercules got out of the video card making business.

The rendering method you refer to TUK101 is tile rendering. ATI and Nvidia cards ar getting better each generation at tossing out unrendered pixels, but without using tiles (takes a whole new architecture from what I understand). The cards were DX7 compliant as they did not have T&L integrated, but did average the performance of a GF2 Pro.

Voodoo Rufus said:

The rendering method you refer to TUK101 is tile rendering. ATI and Nvidia cards ar getting better each generation at tossing out unrendered pixels, but without using tiles (takes a whole new architecture from what I understand). The cards were DX7 compliant as they did not have T&L integrated, but did average the performance of a GF2 Pro.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. It's just that its been about 3 years since I remember those cards being in the think of things and I forgot the terminalogy of what they did to keep fps up. Didnt they use an Nvidia chipset though?

Nope, Imagination Technologies had the chips built by ST Micro. Then ST sold them.

Maybe Intel bought them, I remember a news article saying they might include the tile tech in a chipset someday.....that'd be cool.