Just ordered a new graphics card.

[alfielev]

Hi there, I've just ordered a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 agp 64mb card.

I've just realised I forgot to ask advice here first

Anybody know if there any good? I've seen a few benchmarks where it outperforms a few of the geforce II cards (not the more expensive ones though).

It seems faster then the MX cards but I hope it's just as reliable (it can't be worse than my current Voodoo 3 card).

Anyway I'm off to do some gardening... I hate gardening

Thanks.

[mosquito]

Ok, I checked and it appears to be using the Kyro II chipset (specs)

I like this chipset very much, and I think it's some serious competition for Nvidia. (me hates nvidia) It appears that the Kyro is very good at high resolutions (and 32 bit color). So if you like graphic detail, and you don't need 300fps I think you purchased a nice piece of hardware.

[alfielev]

Thanks for the info, I'm glad I held off buying one until now otherwise I would have had one of the nvidia cards.

[Werewolfdaddy]

You didn't like the voodoo? What was wrong with it? Is it PCI or agp?

[alfielev]

Funny you should say that, I cancelled the order of that 3D Prophet and I'm keeping the Voodoo for now.

I don't know why but I had a bad feeling about that Prophet card, I get the feeling that there may not be that much support for it considering it's not an Nvidia card, so I'm going to wait a little bit longer to see what other people think of it first and see if any problems start popping up with them.

I'm pretty cynical about graphics cards nowadays considering I brought the Voodoo when it first came out, I later found out that 3DFX gave you no technical support at all and they just ignored my e-mails. Ironically this voodoo is pretty reliable now but its a little slow with some of the newer games like Black and White and stuff like that.

All the best.

(Oh yeah forgot to answer you question, its an agp card.)

[Werewolfdaddy]

The voodoo cards are normally good ones. All my closest friends have them and they swear by them. I have a 3D prophet mxII with an Nvidia chip in it; it does okay, but my friends haze me about it. It all depends on your needs. If you are into smooth gameplay at a slight reduction in color quality, the voodoo is hands downt the best card on the market(before the geforce 3, but if image quality is your thing, then I have heard good things about the geforce 2gts. If you have the money to throw down on a card that can do everything but clean the kitchen sink, then the Geforce 3 is your card. It has realtime rendering and a host of other features. Check out nvidia's website; I think that it is www.nvidia.com, but I am not sure. BTW, nvidia bought out 3Dfx. If you need tech support, you may be able to find it at the nvidia site.
The slow performance of your card may have something to do with the driver. Do you know if you have the latest driver or not?
You can also improve the overall performance of your computer by installing more memory.

[alfielev]

Hi there, when I was moaning about 3dfx tech support I meant when they were still going strong. I don't need tech support any more luckily. As far as I know I have the last official drivers that 3dfx made, dunno wether there are any others out there.

The only real trouble I had with the card was overheating (the voodoo 3's were well known for that), but I brought a fan to keep it cool and that made it stable as a rock.

As for upgrading the actual bottleneck that slows everything down on my system is in fact the voodoo, because I have an AMD Thunderbird and 128meg of PC-133 crucial cas-2 sdram (soon to be 256meg). So as you see the next thing is a shiny new graphics card

As you say the Geforce 3 sounds good, trouble is it's going to be over-priced at first in my opinion.