vivid xs 32mb or 3d prophet 4500 64mb

[Mingon]

Currently in the uk the difference in price between the 2 cards is 15%, is the 3d prophet worth the difference ? quick answer needed.

 

[PotNoodle]

IMO - Very little difference.

You might want to read this for some benchmarks.

 

[Mingon]

cheers for that, I am building a budget (ish) system for a friend. But firstly I will do some comparisons with my ELsa ultra, what benchmarks are worth using ?

 

[PotNoodle]

"But firstly I will do some comparisons with my ELsa ultra, what benchmarks are worth using ?"

Thats a loaded question - it depends on whether you want the Ultr to look good or they KYRO!

Surely the best benchmarks - and the most unbiased - would be the games your friend likes playing most.

Find out what he likes and I'm surely they'll be plenty of people to help getting the best on the KYRO under those titles.

 

[BFG10K]

64 MB boards will help alleviate texture swaps and generally provide smoother gameplay. Try to get the 64 MB variant if you can afford it.

 

[PotNoodle]

?64 MB boards will help alleviate texture swaps and generally provide smoother gameplay.?

This is true, however the irony is that, because of KYRO?s nature, it will suffer far less from texture swapping than other cards will.

At 175Mhz It has about 2.6G of bandwidth to play with; this is shared for Geometry binning / culling, texturing and frame buffer bandwidth. Because PowerVR?s architecture uses results in deferred texturing as well only the textures that are required to be visible will need to be swapped across the AGP bus, meaning that the 0.5 Gig of bandwidth that AGP2X provides is less of a bottleneck during AGP texturing than it is for other cards. Kinda a shame that KYROII isn?t AGP4X as this deficient would be lessened even further.

Sorry ? kinda an aside there that I?ve been thinking about for a while.

 

[Mingon]

I currently have/play giants, black and white, starship troopers, quake 3, unreal tournament, half life, deus ex and vampire the masquerade. So out of those which one can be used ? Personally I dont care which performs better, my ultra has the vivo module and it cost less

 

[rickn]

I would personally buy(and did buy) the Hercules. Although if you live in UK maybe VDO offers better technical support than Hercules does. 64mb will save you in games that offer no texture compression.

 

[EdipisReks]

i would get the 64 MB board. even if you don't see a big difference now, you probably will in the future. it just gives you a bit more headroom.

--jacob

 

[Mingon]

ok prophet4500 on the way, cheers people

 

[BFG10K]

PotNoodle:

At 175Mhz It has about 2.6G of bandwidth to play with;

More like ~3 GB.

Because PowerVR?s architecture uses results in deferred texturing as well only the textures that are required to be visible will need to be swapped across the AGP bus, meaning that the 0.5 Gig of bandwidth that AGP2X provides is less of a bottleneck during AGP texturing than it is for other cards.

I know how it works. The point is:
-32 MB Kyro2 boards do experience texture swaps.
-AGP is far slower than local VRAM.
-64 MB boards are more future proof.

 

[PotNoodle]

?More like ~3 GB.?

175Mhz clock with 128bit bus =

175,000,000 x 128 = 22400000000 (bits)

22400000000 / 8 = 2800000000 (bytes)

2800000000 / 1024 = 2734375 Meg

2734375 /1024 = 2.67 Gigabytes per second memory bandwidth. (OK, so I should have said 2.7Gig!)

? I know how it works. The point is:
-32 MB Kyro2 boards do experience texture swaps.
-AGP is far slower than local VRAM.
-64 MB boards are more future proof.?

I didn?t actually say you didn?t know how it works, I was just making a factiodal (new word! ) point; nor did I actually say that whether a 64MB card is worth more or less than a 32MB card.

However, I will say that to date I know of only one game in which the texture demands of the game exceeds the available memory space on a 32MB card; this game being Quake3. Quake3, however, also supports texture compression, meaning that with the compression ratio of 1:6 you would still need 6 times the number / size of textures for that 32MB limitation to be exceeded again ? in the point of Quake3 and KYRO it is far better to run with compression enabled as it enables trilinear virtually for free. Now that virtually every board available supports S3TC it is likely that in future titles texture compression will become the norm rather than the exception, as it facilitates high resolution textures much more easily, or else card bandwidth would need to scale very high to make it a viable proposition (and this, as we all know, is not likely to happen without other areas of the cards pipeline eating this bandwidth up).

Also, as some may know, unlike other cards, KYRO does not benefit from larger video RAM when FSAA is enabled, as it still only uses the same amount of memory as the none FSAA resolution.

These are the facts, mixed in with a small level of opinion. I still make no judgement as to which is best to choose.