Boxed Hercules 3D Prophet 4000 XT

For any prospective buyers, be aware that both the Kyro I and Kyro II (this card is a Kyro I) don't behave properly on anything but Windows 98 SE. The drivers ST Micro released for these cards were pretty poor to begin with and you may have to experiment with the few driver versions they made available to get an adequate experience. They did release a Windows 2000 driver, but it was alpha quality at best and has numerous problems in 2D and 3D mode.

There was no difference between the Kyro I and Kyro II other than clock speed.
 
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GiGaBiTe said:
For any prospective buyers, be aware that both the Kyro I and Kyro II (this card is a Kyro I) don't behave properly on anything but Windows 98 SE. The drivers ST Micro released for these cards were pretty poor to begin with and you may have to experiment with the few driver versions they made available to get an adequate experience. They did release a Windows 2000 driver, but it was alpha quality at best and has numerous problems in 2D and 3D mode.

There was no difference between the Kyro I and Kyro II other than clock speed.
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what about the Kyro II SE?
 
The Kyro II SE was just a higher clocked model. The Kyro I ran at 115 MHz, Kyro II ran at 175 MHz and the Kyro II SE ran at 200 MHz.

All three cards had two TMUs and two ROPs. The higher clocks on the later versions were attained by using a smaller lithography process (180nm vs 250nm on the Kyro I) and I believe a slightly longer pipeline.

ST Micro was working on a Kyro III which was supposed to run at 250 MHz and have four TMUs and four ROPs, but their PC graphics division was closed before it was released. It's unknown if any engineering samples / prototypes ever existed of it. Their design philosophy was interesting as they concentrated on efficiency vs the brute force method that Nvidia and ATI were using at the time, but they just couldn't keep pace with their release cycles.
 
Looks familiar. (no, I'm not the seller)

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^^ I have Monkey Island 2 boxed like that also. It's been a long time since I've seen the Secret of Monkey Island boxed.
 
I've still got a couple Hercules cards in the basement....no packaging anymore though. I liked the company.
 
Man, that brings back memories!

Wish PowerVR would develop a desktop GPU again....the new Furian architecture for smartphones/tablets and SoC is looking pretty stout.
 
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I know anecdotes don't count for a lot, but I never had many problems with my Kyro II in Windows 2000. I must have been one of the lucky ones.
 
Halon said:
I know anecdotes don't count for a lot, but I never had many problems with my Kyro II in Windows 2000. I must have been one of the lucky ones.
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You may have one of the better driver releases.
 
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