150,00$ Kyro II beats Geforce2 Ultra!!!

[NaughtyusMaximus]

I was reading up on this over at slashdot, and came upon this interesting post:

<<If you want to find out what is amazing about this card, read on: This card is based on NEC's powerVR architecture, and is really nothing more than the PowerVR2 clocked up to 175 mhz. What's funny is, I remember getting excited about this card over 3 years ago!! If you want to do more research on the architecture, dig up some old articles on Tom's hardware, where he benches it with quake1. At the time, the card was supposed to clean up the market, and it was going to debut at 125 mhz core/memory speed. (This was at the time when the voodoo1 was the standard, and the voodoo2 had just entered the scene, I remember holding out for this card, and simply settled on a TNT when I found out that NEC decided to drop out of the PC market). Then NEC made a deal with Sega, and put the chip in the dreamcast. What's even more amazing about the chip, is that ST simply had to change the clock to 175 mhz to make it competitive with nvidia's gefore2 ultra. What I think will be scary, is when they revamp this 4 year old chip design, and add T &amp; L. Imagine what a chip like this could do with DDR RAM instead of SDRAM. This current chip only supports SDRAM, which is why they didn't put DDR RAM on the card. I think nvidia has their work cut out for them. Hopefully they will be able to license tile based rendering for their next card. I was really hoping that they would put it in the geforce 3, it would have made quite a bit greater difference than a crossbar memory architcture. >>

I also have to wonder when NVidia is going to implement Gigapixel's technologies.

 

[KevinH]

Nortexoid -- fair enough . I'll give a third amen to NS's wait and see attitude with regards to win2k. BTW, my VIVO got here today and win2k performance makes me VERY, VERY unhappy. :| I cannot overstress from a publisher/developer standpoint how good nVidia worked with us. When No One Lives Forever was being worked on, only ONE card had issues (though at this point I don't know where they stand)...give you a hint, starts with an R and ends with a D. *sigh*.

For the most part though, it seems like the masses all agree that the Kyro2 shows an amazing amount of promise. Ironically, it seems like this card is a champ without the bells and whistles, aka T&amp;L, DDR, etc. I just wonder how it would perform when this technology starts getting pushed.

 

[Maverick]

I used to upgrade to top of the line every two years. Now I think you get a better deal if you get into the upper middle range of performance. You probably spend the same amount of money on average, but you still get to play all the latest games with good performance. I had my last video card for 2 years (Riva 128 + 12 MB voodoo2) and I jumped on the Geforce 2 GTS last July when it was top of the line. Now I'm wishing I'd gotten the TNT2 and then gotten the Geforce2 MX. But oh well, I'll probably wait for the Geforce3 MX or an equivalent card from Kyro. I think PowerVR has a LOT of potential...just look at the dreamcast. Excellent piece of hardware that just wasn't marketted well enough. Even if it can't crunch the same number of polygons as the PS2 I think from a developers standpoint that it was/is the best console system out there. I'll gladly support PowerVR's next gen card if it gives Nvidia a little healthy competition.

 

[Adul]

I wonderif I shall get this has stand by

 

[UKtaxman]

<< If you want to find out what is amazing about this card, read on: This card is based on NEC's powerVR architecture, and is really nothing more than the PowerVR2 clocked up to 175 mhz. What's funny is, I remember getting excited about this card over 3 years ago!! If you want to do more research on the architecture, dig up some old articles on Tom's hardware, where he benches it with quake1. At the time, the card was supposed to clean up the market, and it was going to debut at 125 mhz core/memory speed. (This was at the time when the voodoo1 was the standard, and the voodoo2 had just entered the scene, I remember holding out for this card, and simply settled on a TNT when I found out that NEC decided to drop out of the PC market). Then NEC made a deal with Sega, and put the chip in the dreamcast. What's even more amazing about the chip, is that ST simply had to change the clock to 175 mhz to make it competitive with nvidia's gefore2 ultra. What I think will be scary, is when they revamp this 4 year old chip design, and add T &amp; L. Imagine what a chip like this could do with DDR RAM instead of SDRAM. This current chip only supports SDRAM, which is why they didn't put DDR RAM on the card. >>



Don't want to sound pedantic, but this is at least their 4 iteration using this rendering technique. The original being used in the Matrox M3D(the card that was released at the same time as voodoo1). Then came PVR2 in the Neon(released mainly in Europe) and Dreamcast. Third was the Kyro, released last September/October. The Kyro2 is actually a die shrinked and speeded up Kyro, not PVR2.
As far as features go, it is also packed! How about 32bit internal colour rendering(makes 16bit colour almost equivalent to Nvidia 32bit). 8X multitexturing!!!! 32z buffers!!!! hi res fsaa!!!! on top of ALL the features currently in GF2 except t&amp;l. This is a far more feature rich card than GF(with that one exception).

 

[Urinal Mint]

<< My 32mb Radeon runs Undying smooth as silk at 1600 x 1200 x 32 @85hz on my AV-195TF. I have an Elsa Gladiac, but the Radeon 2D and 3D quality is just soooo much better, the Gladiac is in the closet gathering dust. >>



Too bad that Radeon won't run anything in Win2K faster than my old Monster3D.

 

[Urinal Mint]

Return of the Double Post, in 3D Thwap-o-vision.

 

[Teasy]

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<I don't think the fact that 3 companies are involved is going to hurt sales. Eventually, one of the companies will get squeezed out to maximize profits. This arrangement should not last long.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I can't see how thats going to happen, Imagination Technologies (the Mother company of PowerVR and Videologic Systems) are the idea men, they think up the chip design, then STMicroelectronics make the design a reality, and then that chip is sold to companies like Hercules to make the boards, Imagination Tech also have Videologic System (which is part of Imagination Tech) who make Kyro board which sell in PowerVR's home country (England)

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Anyhow, you can bet yer pants that NV is not far behind with this technology>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I wouldn't say that, PowerVR have being producing cards based on this tech since the PCX1 was released back at the same time the Voodoo1 was out (or maybe a little earlier), and its taken PwerVR this long to finally produce a stable fully compatible tile based renderer, although Gigapixel has been working on it for a while, but the Key here is PowerVR have actually RELEASED 4 (5 with the Kyro II) tile based renderers, Gigapixel have never released anything, infact who has actually seen there design appart from 3DFX/NVIDIA?....nobody, but the tech must have been good because 3DFX bought them so...........

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Giants takes heavy advantage of hardware T&amp;L. Also, DOT3 bumpmapping can only be activated on T&amp;L capable cards (aka Radeon/GeForce)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Last I heard a patch for Giants that allows Dot3 to be used one none HW T&amp;L cards is going to be released.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Well I won't be getting one since I just got a V5500. It gives me FSAA in ANY 3D game (Kyro's only works in OGL for now).>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

No the Kyro 1 can force FSAA in both D3D and OpenGL (I know this cos I have one), and its the same for the Kyro II, either the drivers he's using havent had FSAA implimented in D3D or he's just not seeing the option, but its 100% certain that at release the Kyro II will have full FSAA support.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<I was reading up on this over at slashdot, and came upon this interesting post:

<<If you want to find out what is amazing about this card, read on: This card is based on NEC's powerVR architecture, and is really nothing more than the PowerVR2 clocked up to 175 mhz. What's funny is, I remember getting excited about this card over 3 years ago!! If you want to do more research on the architecture, dig up some old articles on Tom's hardware, where he benches it with quake1. At the time, the card was supposed to clean up the market, and it was going to debut at 125 mhz core/memory speed. (This was at the time when the voodoo1 was the standard, and the voodoo2 had just entered the scene, I remember holding out for this card, and simply settled on a TNT when I found out that NEC decided to drop out of the PC market). Then NEC made a deal with Sega, and put the chip in the dreamcast. What's even more amazing about the chip, is that ST simply had to change the clock to 175 mhz to make it competitive with nvidia's gefore2 ultra. What I think will be scary, is when they revamp this 4 year old chip design, and add T &amp; L. Imagine what a chip like this could do with DDR RAM instead of SDRAM. This current chip only supports SDRAM, which is why they didn't put DDR RAM on the card. I think nvidia has their work cut out for them. Hopefully they will be able to license tile based rendering for their next card. I was really hoping that they would put it in the geforce 3, it would have made quite a bit greater difference than a crossbar memory architcture. >>>>>>>>>>>

Actually This tile based rendering has been used in PowerVR products since the PCX1 which was released at the same time as the Voodoo1, its just taken PowerVR so many years to finally make a tile based renderer thats as compatible and user freindly as a traditional card. The Kyro 2 isn't a PowerVR2 clocked at 175mhz, the PowerVR2 was the series name for the Videologic Neon250 which was release only in the U.K, at first it was going to be a massive card and was going to be released at the time of the TNT and Voodoo2 and would almost certainly have crushed its opposition, it also had some incredible features for its time like Dot3 and FSAA, but then came the lucritive deal with Sega for the dreamcast and Imagination technologies (the mother company of PowerVR and Videologic system) and NEC decided why risk putting this card on the market and maybe not selling great when they could release a similar (slightly modified) chip (the PowerVRDC) in the Sega Dreamcast and get loads of guarenteed cash from that, so they went with Sega and put the release of the Neon250 back while they consentrated on the production of PowerVRDC. By the time they did get the time to release the Neon250 it was similar in performance to its competition (voodoo3, TNT2) and also had driver bugs in some games and had no OpenGL ICD (they used MiniGL) so it really got nowhere. Then Imagination Technologies moved on to there Series 3 PowerVR architecture which turned out to be Kyro I, some of the main differences between PowerVR2 (neon250) PowerVR3 (Kyro) was the addition of an extra pixel pipe (taking the number of pipes from 1 too 2), also lots of other features where added like Internal True Colour which allows for close to 32bit image quality in 16bit mode, 8 layer multi-texturing which allows the Kyro too render 8 texture layers to a pixel in 1 pass even though it has only 1 TMU per pipe, EMBM and more. The Kyro was released a few months back and its a great card with loads of unique features but it was only produced by Powercolor, INNO3D and Videologic Systems so it didn't really get a big audience, then there's the Kyro II which as far as I can see is a Kyro I on a 0.18M process at 175mhz, I'm thinking that maybe the extra 3 million transistors is to help to clock the card to 175mhz, like redesigning a critical path or better clock distribution.

Tim sweeney recently expressed some resevations on weather a deferred renderer like Kyro could use a HW T&amp;L unit built into the chip like Geforce and Radeon, Imagination Tech have said they have contacted Sweeney and have arranged a meeting with him in which they will show him its not impossible!!!!!!!!

For more info on what features the Kyro II will have and some very good explainations of the features have a look at this beyond3d review of a Kyro I card: http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/kyrovivid/index1.php

NOTE: This review is from a Kyro I card NOT a Kyro II card, I've only put this link here so people can see a very good explanation of some of the Kyro I's feature which will also be in the Kyro II chip.

 

[NOX]

<< Gigapixel has been working on it for a while, but the Key here is PowerVR have actually RELEASED 4 (5 with the Kyro II) tile based renderers >>

So let my get this striate so I don?t get confused or say something wrong and look dumb when I do. Kyro II (PowerVR), brings to the market what Gigapixel was talking about back when 3dfx had already bought them out, and benchmarks using this technology was showing up on the web? That?s some interesting sh1t! I remember when a lot of people were talking about this just before 3dfx closed its door.

 

[rockhard]

Hi,

Was just wondering if this &quot;FSAA for FREE!&quot; is all its cracked up to be?
I play a lot of Falcon4 on my GF2 MX but it aint too clever with FSAA @ 4x but looks great

Any of u guys tried the Kyro1 with Falcon4?

NE1 wanna buy a GF2 MX?

Thanx guys,

rockhard =)

 

[Orbius]

Its pretty funny to me that the 3dfx V5 5500 was crucified for its lack of T&amp;L when no games used it, and now just when T&amp;L is about to be a really useful feature people are willing to overlook it in the Kyro II.

Having said that is the Kyro II one of the best gaming cards out there right now? Looks good to me for the price.

 

[Sparky Anderson]

I would also like to know how it does in Tribes 2, cause by playing the beta I know my Voodoo 3 is going to have to go in a few weeks.

 

[Teasy]

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<So let my get this striate so I don?t get confused or say something wrong and look dumb when I do. Kyro II (PowerVR), brings to the market what Gigapixel was talking about back when 3dfx had already bought them out, and benchmarks using this technology was showing up on the web? That?s some interesting sh1t! I remember when a lot of people were talking about this just before 3dfx closed its door.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Yeah its the same tech, its not identical to the way Gigapixel did it but its the same thing (PowerVR were doing this along time before Gigapixel tried it).

<<<<<<<<<<<<<Was just wondering if this &quot;FSAA for FREE!&quot; is all its cracked up to be?
I play a lot of Falcon4 on my GF2 MX but it aint too clever with FSAA @ 4x but looks great

Any of u guys tried the Kyro1 with Falcon4?

NE1 wanna buy a GF2 MX?

Thanx guys,>>>>>>>>>>>>>

AFAIK the Kyro II doesn't have FSAA4free, this feature is in the new PowerVRMBX mobile GPU, but as for free FSAA the PowerVR technology can actually do this for free if its implimented right, if PowerVR use Multi-Sampling Anti Aliasing like the Geforce 3 uses it'll be free on the PowerVR card because of the way it can be implimented on a tiler.

The method of FSAA on the Kyro II AFAIK is OGSS like the Geforce but there's a difference, yes you guessed it Kyro II does it much more efficiently, I'll try to explain:

Lets say were talking about 800x600x16 as an output resolution with 4xFSAA, normally FSAA on a traditional card like Geforce1/2/ultra or Radeon first renders a game at 2 times the x and y axis of the output resolution, this gives a source resolution of 1600x1200x16, for this they need a 1600x1200x16 z-buffer and a 1600x1200x16 framebuffer, four times the fillrate and four times the texture banwidth, then the 1600x1200x16 image is sampled down to 800x600x16 in the framebuffer and sent to the screen, now lets look at the way Kyro II does it. First the Kyro II renders each tile at 2x the x and y axis in the on-chip cache, then its sampled down (still on-chip) and sent to the screen, this means that there is no 1600x1200x16 z-buffer required, and only a 800x600x16 framebuffer, obviously it still needs 4 times the fillrate and 4 times the texture bandwidth, so appart from extra texture bandwidth FSAA on the Kyro II is bandwidth free.

 

[JorgeElPrimero]

Hey I am also one of those people that have old cards slowing up their system but i am waiting till I see this thing. If it comes close to the gf2 gts its mine I LOVE supporting the underdog!!

 

[Soccerman]

I find it interestint that people are now saying, 'oh yeah, nVidia has that technology too!'

interesting how we don't actually see the technology from nVidia today.. why? they had to buy someone to acquire it, and they bought them too late to affect their current product.

if the companies behind the Kyro have any sense, they'll ramp the power on this chip like there's no tommorow, so that When nVidia DOES release a tile based card, they'll be facing some stiff competition.

Though I personally wonder how far along Kyro was compared to Gigapixel, I think Gigapixel was further ahead, because all they did was R&amp;D.. PURE R&amp;D!

 

[Teasy]

<<<<<<<<<<<Though I personally wonder how far along Kyro was compared to Gigapixel, I think Gigapixel was further ahead, because all they did was R&amp;D.. PURE R&amp;D!>>>>>>>>>

Imagination Tech have also just been doing Pure R&amp;D, they don't produce the chips, they just R&amp;D the chip design and then give the finshed design to STMicroelectronics who make the chip, then Imagination tech get a comission for every chip sold, and Imagination tech have been doing pure R&amp;D into tile based rendering for over 5 years now, I doubt Gigapixel have been going that long.

 

[Teasy]

Oh and I just want to mention if I haven't already (can't remember and can't be bothered to reread my posts) that the bug with MBTR is already fixed for the Kyro II and all the guy doing the review needed to do was turn on a certian option in the control panel, this problem occured with certain games on the PowerVR2 cards but was fixed in the PowerVR3 design (Kyro/ Kyro II), and the Kyro II does have the same option to fix the problem because I saw it in the pic of the driver panel in the review.

Hold on, I just looked back at those pics and both the OpenGL and D3D panel have &quot;force full-scene antialiasing&quot;, so why did the guy doing the review say that Kyro II only has FSAA in OpenGL mode????

 

[BFG10K]

Hardware:

I was missing some overclock!

What? You want to be overclocked? Err, okaaaayyy...

Well its has a 270 dac so its not usable for 1600x1200x32x85 powerusers!

So, you've decided to attack PowerVR now that 3dfx have gone bellyup? What a pathetic little troller you are.

MadRat:

GeForce2-MX sucks compared to a Voodoo3.

I don't think so.

I've played them side by side and the MX just stutters constantly.

Everyone else in your position disagrees.

The gamma has to be cranked high on the MX to get a vivid picture.

I found the exact opposite, namely that the Voodoo was too dark.

 

[Weyoun]

god it just irritates me that people have just *1* experience with a card and say that the whole lot is crap. Same goes for drivers, a person has *1* problem with a set of drivers, and suddenly, 'card X's drivers are CRAP CRAP CRAP I say!!'. At least acknowledge that it is YOUR experience, and does NOT necessarily represent the whole range. After 3 nVidia cards i didn't give up, and finally found a really nice card (GF2MX) that suits my needs. I honestly couldnt have bought a better component for my PC. I like the speed, I like the features, it runs cool, it DOESNT crash, it was cheap, and never complains. I'm now starting to look at the KyroII, as it certainly would fit all of the above criteria.

I'm certainly not overlooking T&amp;L in the Kyro. I know that basically EVERY game that will be released from here on in will feature it, and there will be a noticable difference. I'll probably hang out upgrading to a new card when, say in the KyroII's case, it has T&amp;L and perhaps DX8 functionality.

 

[Quickfingerz]

It'll probably be less than $150.00 too.

 

[rickn]

It is nice another contender is thrown into the fray since 3dfx is gone. I can only imagine what this chip could do with 250mhz core, 4 pipelines, T&amp;L and DDR. Holy Sh!tnitz

They really should have increased the pipeline count, it takes a pretty big hit with Trilinear and Anisotropic filtering

 

[BenSkywalker]

Teasy-

I can figure how you could make a T&amp;L unit work on a tiler, but how the he!l do you make it effective? The poly througput on the Kyro is extremely poor compared to pretty much any traditional post '98, I'm interested if you have any idea how they would make it work effectively? Pretty much how I see it now is you could throw all the T&amp;L power at the chip you wanted and the rasterizer is going to be the bottleneck.

I've already bugged Dave over this(we've all heard that Gigapixel has a workaround for this problem) one and he isn't saying a thing. I've tried to figure out how you could and I can't come up with anything that wouldn't require eDRAM or other sort of high speed cache(which would kill off many of the advantages of using deferred).

 

[rickn]

Ben: havent they already? Or are you referring to get it to work in a PC solution? The Naomi2 arcade boards uses two PowerVR2 chips and a Imagtec developed T&amp;L unit.

 

[BenSkywalker]

rickn-

&quot;The Naomi2 arcade boards uses two PowerVR2 chips and a Imagtec developed T&amp;L unit.&quot;

It works, from what I've seen of the specs it isn't all that great(don't get me wrong, with a dedicated piece of hardware the games should look great, kind of a PC distinction I guess you could say). I was under the impression that Naomi used dual PVR3 chips? That should have the peak througput right around 10-11 million/sec depending on clock(possibly 15million/sec? depending on clock rate) for the dual rasterizer cores AFAICT. Even if the T&amp;L unit can crunch 300million polys per second, the rasterizer is the limiting factor for &quot;tilers&quot; to date.

As bandwith is to traditionals right now, geometry is to deferred renderers. Have you looked at 3DMark2K1 yet? Fvck the benchmark, what I want to know is if you have seen the &quot;Nature&quot; scene in the demo:Q:Q?
Those are the types of environments I want to see on a full scale and while traditionals have issues with overdraw, I know how they are going to deal with them(front to back rendering with early checks eliminating a great deal and the always graceful brute force). I have no idea how the he!l &quot;tilers&quot; are going to deal with significantly higher geometry loads(I know there is a way to do it, I just want to know what it is).

 

[Teasy]

<<<<<<<<<Teasy-

I can figure how you could make a T&amp;L unit work on a tiler, but how the he!l do you make it effective? The poly througput on the Kyro is extremely poor compared to pretty much any traditional post '98, I'm interested if you have any idea how they would make it work effectively? Pretty much how I see it now is you could throw all the T&amp;L power at the chip you wanted and the rasterizer is going to be the bottleneck.

I've already bugged Dave over this(we've all heard that Gigapixel has a workaround for this problem) one and he isn't saying a thing. I've tried to figure out how you could and I can't come up with anything that wouldn't require eDRAM or other sort of high speed cache(which would kill off many of the advantages of using deferred).>>>>>>>>>

No sorry I can't help you with an explenation there because I'm not to knowledgable with HW T&amp;L, but as far as I know ther poly throughput is not worse on the Kyro then any other non HW T&amp;L chip, I remember someone talking in the Beyond3D forum about how thier Kyro wasn't pushing very meany poly's in the 3dmark2k test compared to a geforce using software T&amp;L, but they also said that before they upgraded there BIOS to 1.91 there throughput was higher, and someone from IMGTEC said they'd look into the problem, could you explain why you think it would be so hard for the Kyro to make use of the extra poly's that a HW T&amp;L unit would give?

AFAIK the only difference between the NAOMI1 and NAOMI2 is the T&amp;L unit, and considering how much better NAOMI2 is compared to NAOMI1 it looks like the T&amp;L unit is being used very effectively.

<<<<<<<<<It works, from what I've seen of the specs it isn't all that great>>>>>>>>>>

I don't know where you've got this info from but from what I've heard the T&amp;L unit on the NAOMI2 is far supperior then the Geforce 1/2 T&amp;L units and that the games on the NAOMI2 use a very large amount of poly's.

<<<<<<<<I was under the impression that Naomi used dual PVR3 chips>>>>>>>>

No I'm pretty sure the NAOMI2 uses dual PowerVR2 chips.