Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged S3 Savage 3D

Performance

The Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged was tested on a Pentium II/400, Abit BX6 motherboard, 64MB RAM, 5.1GIG WD Caviar.

Quake2 was conducted using version 3.19 w/no sound

D3D benchmarks will be posted as soon as I find a quality real world (game) D3D benchmark which contains a significant number of polygons per scene (but not too much for the game to be CPU limited), multitextured polygons, and stable D3D support. Having said that, note that D3D performance of Savage3D based solutions should be significantly faster than OpenGL performance due to driver maturity.

The Terminator BEAST runs @120mhz opposed to the 110mhz of the AOpen PA70. The results show that at 640x480 the clock speed really makes a difference.

Already we see the weakness of the OpenGL driver (MiniGL) for the Savage3D board. The Hercules Terminator BEAST's expected performance should be around the 46fps range. The lackluster performance increase over the 10mhz slower part (Aopen PA70) can almost solely be attributed to driver weakness.

NOTE: The Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged used the OpenGL ICD for this test because the MiniGL driver was slower (27.5fps).

Now our previous hunch that the Savage3D is being limited by drivers is substantiated with even more data. The MiniGL driver w/the Hercules BEAST performs the same as with the AOpen PA70. The only reason I can think of that the OpenGL ICD is faster than the MiniGL driver is that it does not implement as many per-pixel features which take extra processing. (Edge AA comes to mind; the OpenGL ICD is significantly slower at 640x480 and 800x600)

Note that all of these performance numbers are taken with Vsync off. While Vsync off is "ok" for the 3dfx Banshee and Hercules Dynamite TNT, the Savage3D boards cannot function with Vsync-off, i.e. the resulting image "tearage" (is that a word?) is unbearable. NOTE: 32bit color tests had random failures and I have concluded that quake2 @32bit color is not an option with this board. D3D games will work at 32bit color.

Conclusion

From a pure performance stand-point, the Terminator BEAST isn't an exciting solution. The performance is sub-par in OpenGL. D3D performance should be around Banshee speeds (guestimate); however, there isn't anything to be excited about, since the drivers are unstable and the TNT boards (which can be had for around $30 more)

Performance:            80%

Quality:                     65%

Documentation:        75%

Value:                       85%

Overall Impression: 75%

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