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In the Forums... |
Posted: June 22, 2001 Written by: Dustin Jones FSAA The 3D Prophet 4500 features Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) support, and has the option for both 2x and 4x modes. The FSAA works very similar to the way the Nvidia FSAA does, wherein it renders the scene at a higher resolution (2x or 4x the resolution) and then scales it back down into the internal texture engine before the final frame is displayed on the screen. As you'll see in the images below, the FSAA works, but not tremendously well. There are still 'jaggies' on the screen even in 4x FSAA mode. 
 
  The 3D Prophet 4500 is actually 22% faster than the GeForce 2 using 2xFSAA, running at a playable 45 frames per second.  Running at 4xFSAA lessens the gap one whopping percent, with the Kyro II scoring 23 frames per second, opposed to the 18 of the GeForce 2. Overclocking Hercules opted to attach a Blue Orb-like HSF to cool the 3D Prophet 4500, even though it is really not even needed, seeing as how the card really doesn't generate that much heat. I suspect it may be simply for aesthetical purposes, to make the card more attractive to users, who on sight of a fan, will associate that will speed. As mentioned previously, there are no overclocking features in the PowerVR drivers, so I needed to use PowerStrip to change the speeds of the card. I managed to get the 3D Prophet 4500 up 10% to 195MHz, from the default 175MHz. Let's check out some benchmarks with the card overclocked.  In Quake III, the extra 20MHz only increased my score 1 frame per second, which is rather discouraging to the idea of making this card a little less sluggish by overclocking.  Using the Serious Sam synthetic test, the fillrate increased to 188 Mega Pixels/s, an 11% increase in raw fillrate. The card also remained 95% efficient, with the theoretical fillrate being 195 MegaPixels/s. That's a big increase, but in actuality, the in-game performance is unaffected by the overclock, making it fairly useless to overclock. |
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