Hercules Terminator 3D/DX review

S3 was one of the first manufacturers to produce a fully featured 3D accelerated chip aimed at the home PC marketplace, and featured prominently in our 3D graphics cards roundup (see issue 28). Unfortunately, all of the cards with the ViRGE and ViRGE/VX processors performed disappointingly: of the 11 cards reviewed, cards based on S3 chips occupied the bottom six slots on the performance table. Hercules' latest combined 2D/3D graphics acceleration sports the beefed-up second generation DX processor which aims to redress the balance.

The new Terminator, which boasts 4Mb of EDO DRAM, is aimed firmly at the desktop leisure market, a territory that remains stoutly defended by the excellent Matrox Mystique which won a Labs Value award for the best overall 2D/3D performance and extremely reasonable price. In light of this, I tested the card against its straight ViRGE based predecessor and a 4Mb Matrox Mystique in order to find out just how large a stride forward, if any, S3 has taken. I used a Pentium/200 MMX system with 32Mb of RAM and a fast Seagate Medalist Pro 2.5Gb hard disk (reviewed issue 30, p119) for testing.

The ViRGE/DX processor doesn't feature any dramatic additions. S3 has simply carried out an all round performance and feature tweak in a bid to regain lost ground. The integrated RAMDAC has been upgraded and now sports a clock speed of 170MHz, and improvements to the 3D graphics engine include the new 'SmartFilter technology' for higher quality texture mapping and a 'parallel processing perspective engine' that's supposed to speed up frame rates.

Not only are frame rates boosted, there's a performance improvement all round. Microsoft's 3D benchmark showed that the DX based Terminator 3D is significantly quicker than its forerunner, although it still can't quite match the Mystique. Its fill rate of 7.16 million pixels per second, polygon throughput of 149.54 kilo pixels per second and intersection throughput of 1.27 kilo pixels per second all lag behind the Mystique's scores.

Frame rates gleaned from the tunnel and twist demonstrations serve to confirm this state of affairs. The DX processor makes a vast improvement in the Terminator's performance. The tunnel test yielded 31.94fps (frames per second) while the twist frame rate was 72.46fps: improvements of 75 and 31 per cent respectively, although still not up to the 37.17fps and 75.75fps of the Matrox. DOS performance follows a similar pattern. Running a Quake frame-rate test at a resolution of 360 « 480 (vid mode 10) I clocked the Terminator 3D at 19.52fps (frames per second) versus the Mystique's 20.11fps.

The Hercules moved ahead, however, when it came to our 2D application benchmarks. A combination of improved drivers, the new DX processor and rapid 40 nanosecond RAM all helped the Terminator 3D/DX to a significant lead of 0.2.

To show off the improved 3D performance, the ViRGE accelerated, ten level demo of Descent II comes in the box with a patch-on floppy designed to take advantage of the new engine. With an eye on the future, Hercules has included a software DVD player (MPEG-2) as well as the familiar Xing software MPEG player.

You can get hold of the DX Terminator 3D for an extremely reasonable £110, cheaper than the equivalent Mystique. This, coupled with significantly faster 2D acceleration, makes it an enticing proposition. Although 3D performance lags slightly behind the Mystique, it supports far more 3D features, such as bilinear filtering, alpha blending, fogging and transparency. Hercules and S3's new DX processor assume the combined 2D/3D throne for now and Matrox is finally deposed.

Author: Jonathan Bray