The rumors about cooperation between STM and Hercules have been finally proven. Today the two companies announced a new graphics chipset aka KYRO II and the first graphics card based on it Hercules 3D PROPHET 4500. Here are some specs of Hercules 3D PROPHET 4500:

• KYRO II graphics core manufactured with 0.18 micron technology and working at 175MHz. Tile rendering architecture;
• 64MB SDRAM with 128bit bus working at 175MHz;
• 270MHz RAMDAC;
• No hardware T&L;
• 8-layer multi-texturing;
• FSAA 2x and 4x;
• Environment Bump Mapping support.

It’s still too early to speak about the performance of KYRO II since this chip has a totally different architecture. However, the graphics card manufacturers position the cards based on KYRO II as direct competitors to GeForce2 MX400. This is quite justified since the cost of a graphics card version without the TV-Out will make around $150 and with TV-Out - $160. Also we expect Creative to announce a similar graphics card in the near future, too. The mass sales of KYRO II based products should start in mid April.
The fact that KYRO II aroused interest of such a well-known company as Hercules gives us hope that the future of this chip will be more successful than that of its predecessor. At least there shouldn’t be any problems with the drivers, which were typical of KYRO.