Features (cont'd)

More details

Like the other cards in the value segment, the Kyro II doesn't offer the programmable pixel and vertex shaders present in the DirectX 8-compliant NVIDIA GeForce3. Rather, it's more of a hybrid DirectX 7 board, offering DOT3 and environment-mapped bump mapping (a feature that isn't present on the GeForce2 family) but lacks a hardware T&L unit.

Kyro II supports ordered-grid super-sampled FSAA just like the ATI and NVIDIA GeForce2 boards and not the jittered-grid super-sampling (JGSS) 3dfx's Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 were famous for. A lot of people scoffed at the framerate of 3dfx's Voodoo5, but once you've witnessed 2x and especially 4x JGSS FSAA in Counter-strike it's hard not to be impressed. Once again, we've noticed this can vary from game to game. Counter-strike looks exceptionally better while Quake 3 is just a nice improvement. Flight-sims, sports, and racing games also offer a considerable improvement over conventional anti-aliasing. Of course, with previous cards in the value segment, FSAA was more of a checkmark feature that no one used - the hit on framerate was too high. Given the nature of its TBR architecture, we conducted a slew of FSAA tests to see if the same holds up for Kyro II. Here are a handful of image quality screenshots:

GeForce2 MX 400 FSAA Disabled

Kyro II FSAA Disabled

GeForce2 MX 400 2x FSAA

Kyro II 2x FSAA

GeForce2 MX 400 4x FSAA

Kyro II 4x FSAA

While Kyro II's 2x FSAA clearly looks better than GeForce2 MX 400, it's a bit harder to see the difference between either card in 4x FSAA mode. Therefore, if you're really interested, we highly suggest you download the original bitmap images and judge for yourself.

Click here to download the original .BMP images (4.63MB)

Another new feature ST was able to add to Kyro II is texture compression support. This has been in the works for some time now (ST had originally wanted to add support at the beginning of this year) but licensing delays have prevented it from being introduced. This is a feature that can also be applied to the original Kyro via an updated driver release.

Internal true color

One visual quality feature Kyro and Kyro II boast over conventional architectures is internal true color technology. In order to display a 16-bit image, conventional accelerators render internally in 32-bit, then dither down to 16-bit. As additional detail is added to the polygon, this process is repeated, further degrading image quality.

In contrast, Kyro II performs all rendering in 32-bit before dithering the final image once to 16-bit. This results in less image degradation than conventional accelerators. To illustrate this, we took the following image from the image quality test in 3Dmark 2000:

3DMark 2000 image quality test

Here's a closeup of the first lamp in the bottom right corner of the scene. The left image is Kyro II while the right image is GeForce2 MX 400. Both images were taken with 16-bit color.

Once again, it's a bit hard to see the details in these jpegs, so we've provided both 16-bit and 32-bit bitmaps for your convenience.

Click here to download the original .BMP images (2.70MB)