Introduction

Late?

For those of you joining us a bit late, the next paragraph will bring you up to speed. For more technical info on Kyro as well as a brief background of the companies behind it, (NEC and STMicro) check out our earlier preview and come back to this article for the updated numbers.

The KYRO is PowerVR's third generation chip. Advancing their method of tile-based rendering to the point where it will compete with the likes of the GeForce/Viper II with specs that resemble those of a TNT2. The card has no intention of vying for the number one position at the moment. It is targeted entirely for the gamer on a budget. The key competition this card will face comes from the prior generations of NVIDIA cards. (The GeForce SDR and DDR.) Both of these cards have been dropping in price since the release of the Voodoo5 and will prove to be very tough adversaries.

Numbers? Ooops...

This preview gives a taste of how this card will perform. The 64 MB card we have in our possession is not final in terms of clock speed or driver version. This means the results you see here are likely to go one place - up. By how much is something we'll have to watch out for. We have new numbers for this preview. All our KYRO 64MB numbers remained the same, but we've added a few tests and rerun a few others. A few astute readers noticed our Voodoo5 numbers were a bit higher than normal. It turns out our test system had been tweaked with, and gibs had been turned off. With this little problem remedied we proceeded to throw the last three generations of NVIDIA cards into the mix.

Specifications for KYRO

12 million transistors
0.25 micron process
125 MHz core / memory clock
64 MB SDRAM
2 Pixel Pipelines
250 megapixel/s fillrate (750 megapixel/s equivalent fillrate)
Support for 16-64 MB of SDRAM or SGRAM
128-bit data path to memory (2GB/s bandwidth)
32-bit z-buffer
Tile rendering architecture
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (2x and 4x)
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM)
8-Layer Multitexturing
Motion compensation support
Support for AGP 4X, SBA, DiME
DXTC Texture Compression
Full OpenGL ICD
270 MHz RAMDAC
LCD out