For such an in-depth 4 part article, they really slouched on one of the very instrumental and upturning part of the graphics industry. Actually they watered it down so much they didn't even bother to suggest how powerful the PowerVR Kyro II (2) was compared to the competition, instead just lumping it in with the Geforce 2 MX lineup and then making a claim that it was only powerful enough to provide low end performance. This is an outright falsehood. The PowerVR Kyro 2, of which the Hercules 4500 was a stellar seller, having made up a good chunk of the low cost gaming market for such a relatively "new" competitor. Being an underdog and having a few scares from the previous problems it had that had required a specially built API to run on it's technology to try and avoid.
The PowerVR Kyro and most notably the Kyro 2 completely shed all its deficiencies that PowerVR had in previous generation cards. Not only did it work with Direct3D based games and OpenGL out of the box without wrappers to "make" it work. It was the first card that was truly Tile Based and Purely Efficient at it's tasks. It was priced initially below that of the Geforce 2 MX series but after Nvidia's price cuts resulted in being about the same, however of considerable value to note is the fact that it performed equivalent in speed to that of a Geforce 2 GTS and in various scenarios managed to edge out the Geforce 2 Ultra. The biggest value of the Kyro 2 was that it excelled at high resolutions, not suffering the pitfalls of the other 3D technology due to its efficient tile based deferred rendering tech, which only had to work on and present what was visible. The other cards suffered massively as you increased the resolution, and even with their hyper Z tech and various methods to help cull the information that wasn't ever going to be seen, only was able to do so much and wasted a lot of resources to do it.
Another noticeable advantage is that it was the first product to do pure 32bit coloring even while operating in 16bit mode for legacy games that still used 16bit. At the time it was still something that was ongoing, to play games that only provided 16bit color depth options. In this case the Kyro 2 excelled at producing the best image quality in class.
Among other things it was the first productive to fully support and operate with Application/Game Profiles that worked. Apply and overriding game/application Graphic settings. Additionally it had the ability to provide what was coined as "Free Trilinear Filtering" along with a very VERY minimal hit for Anisotropic Filtering, something that was relatively new and other products were seeing a larger performance hit by adding.
The product raised a lot of hoopla over at Nvidia as Nvidia was determined to remain king in almost all the markets, however was not only losing to what was considered to be a much slower, less resource hungry and considerably less powerful product that managed to outperform their low end products, but managed to directly content with their highest end. This resulted in Nvidia producing a set of slides/documents to try and displace and whittle down PowerVR's product as best it can. Only after which all of which was determined to be relatively false and nothing more than being in bad taste PR stunt.
The true potential of the PowerVR Kyro 2 was only lost due to it's lack of a dedicated Transforming and Lighting capabilities, requiring the CPU to do the work and therefore ensuring the card remained a DX7 compliant GPU. A large group of newly won over PowerVR users waited patiently for a newer DX8 model to arrive, but ST Micro had dismantled that idea.
For a product that only had about 1/4th of the raw power a Geforce 2 Ultra had, it played toe to toe with it quite a bit, brought active gaming profile creation to the market properly and also made both Nvidia and ATI extremely nervous and jump started their next generation products to be better designed and up to the task of being more efficient as well. It's DEFINITELY not a product that should only have a off hand mention and categorized as just a low end budget card that didn't have any impact on anything at all.
