AnandTech's KyroII Review

[BenSkywalker]

Good read, like the choices of benchmarks

 

[rbV5]

Impressive!

 

[KevinH]

For the money that is one heck of a card. Good job Guillemot/STMicroelectronics/Imagination!

-K-

--On second thought, for a hundred bucks more this is STILL one heck of a card.

 

[CHHASmatroxuser]

Impressive indeed, this also means that the original Kyro will be one helluva bargain for cheap systems, as it is bound to drop in price soon.

 

[Mem]

Definetly better then what I thought,very good performance infact,just have to wait & see how good the drivers are in everyday use.

 

[Infra]

shameless copy of the post in General Hardware:

Its really impressive..but as the Anandtech review mentions, it needs both good drivers, and a T&L engine.I assume those drivers used in the tests were alpha/beta or something similar..and would be updated when the card finally ships out.

I would think that the next generation of PowerVR chips would have T&L engines.If so, I'm pre-ordering this nextgen chip, if such a thing exists

Until then, I'm sticking to my GeForce2 MX.

 

[BFG10K]

Those benchmarks are impressive and I'm very pleased that bumping up the core clock speed had such a perfromance boost. I'm stunned that it beats a GF2 MX at 640 x 480 x 32 in Quake 3 and even more stunned at how it creams a 64 MB Radeon DDR in Quake 3.

If this thing had a T&L engine it could seriously compete with a GF3 and cost 1/3 the price. Now that's impressive.

 

[Daemon_UK]

Everyone keeps on banging on the T+L issue, with the companies next release this won't be such
an issue..

Gamespot

The one significant feature that the Kyro II chip doesn't offer when compared with those more established competitors is hardware transform and lighting (T&L). ST has the technology, but it has decided not to include it in the current chip, mainly because current games don't support T&L well, if at all.

Note whats in bold. They have the capability to do it, but didn't feel that current games need it.

Just imagine for a minute. KYRO II, with full DX8 spec, and T&L (programmable GPU if they take a leaf from Nvidia and ATI). And for $150 bucks?

Nvidia be afraid, be VERY afraid!

 

[PeAK]

Interesting product for consoles where cost is important and where memory footprint/size matters. The review did not get into how DX8 compliant(pixel shaders, EBM, vertex skinning,etc) this design is.
For this info, you will need to read other reviews.

Like most of the reviews at this site, their are limited comments on 3D image quality (saturation, contrast, darkness, details, etc) or 2D quality (sharpness of text). For this info you will have to
read other reviews.

Beyond 3D games other features that are increasingly important for a video card to perform
such as

1. DVD support, CPU usage and image quality
2. digital flatpanel support via DVI
3. Video out capability
4. Videon-in from camcorder capability

Since the product is evolutionary, some of the questions about skipped frames and queued frames is evident in earlier reviews should also be addressed. These sort of driver optimization tricks are well know today due to their use in early Nvidia products and later day Savage based products. Reviewers should know better.
The product for 3D games looks very promising at 1/3 the price of competing Nvidia products, but
I doubt that 10-20% differences in already high framerates will make any significant real difference in actual game play today.

 

[Finality]

<< ST has the technology, but it has decided not to include it in the current chip, mainly because current games don't support T&amp;L well, if at all. >>


Try instead. &quot;We never realized people wanted T&amp;L so we never designed it. Yes it is important but we wont put it in because that would mean pulling delaying it hence pulling a Bitboys&quot;

 

[BenSkywalker]

PeAK-

&quot;These sort of driver optimization tricks are well know today due to their use in early Nvidia products and later day Savage based products. Reviewers should know better.&quot;

You forgot the by far worse offender of this, ATi. They pushed their RagePro&quot;Turbo&quot; drivers as boosting performance ~30%-40% even though it was only in WinBench98 and overall the drivers were slower in actual games(where they were ~20% slower in some cases)

&quot;Like most of the reviews at this site, their are limited comments on 3D image quality (saturation, contrast, darkness, details, etc)&quot;

What would you base it on? Reference rasterizers? Purely subjective? Big problem with subjectivity, it is subjective LOD bias for instance, this board is a good example of being all over the place between reducing aliasing and increasing texture detail. No matter how honestly you state subjectivity you still have a personal preference.

&quot;or 2D quality (sharpness of text).&quot;

On which monitor?

&quot;DVD support, CPU usage and image quality&quot;

One out of twenty, maybe, care about that.

&quot;Video out capability&quot;

One out of thirty.

&quot;Videon-in from camcorder capability&quot;

One out of a hundred and fifty.

&quot;digital flatpanel support via DVI&quot;

One out of five hundred, if that.

If you want a review with less information about 3D performance and more about the superficial/supplemental portions of a board then look to ZDNet or the like. This review gave more of what most people seem to want, 3D benchmarks in different applications.

 

[skace]

I can't count the number of games that use T&amp;L. But I always thought there were quite a few. Can anyone confirm which of these use T&amp;L? Neverwinter Nights, Q3, Sacrafice, Giants, FAKK2, Rune, Black and White, Evolva. These are also the games that come to mind when I think of stunning visuals. I'm not saying T&amp;L is a necesity, but it is a nice step in the right direction.

*edit* Reading your other post now Ben, I guess all the T&amp;L info I could ever want is in that one

But anyways, Kryo II looks like a nice card to get until the Geforce3 kicks in full affect. Although, Geforce2's are dropping in price quite nicely also.

If the Kryo II had come out when the Geforce2 Ultra came out and it was $150, THEN I would be impressed...

 

[lifeguard1999]

So where were the CPU scaling tests that they mentioned in the article? Not everyone runs a 1 GHz machine. (o.k. I do, but not everyone.)

 

[KevinH]

I'd hardly say DVI is remotely a consideration for 99 percent of the target audience of these cards (read...gamers). Likewise, the same can be said with issue number 4 there Peak. Camcorder? Don't think so.

 

[blurbme]

yahoo!!! now we have something to cheer about, a $150 card whips the ass of nvidia $300 high-end card. shame on u nvidia, esp 4x FSAA.

 

[bluemax]

For all those people whining that they want T&amp;L....
What do you need it FOR, since at this point it does little or nothing. Very, very few games use it at all, let alone effectively.
Get a nice $100 kyro which outperforms an MX (with better visual quality) and by the time you NEED T&amp;L for a bunch of games, the Kyro3 will be out. Or the GeForce3 might actually be affordable. Naw.... not that.

 

[Dwight]

I don't care about t&amp;l, what I want to know is if it handles table fog well. My radeon is a dog in CS smoke. Can the Kyro handle this? The radeon sure can't.

 

[cmaMath13]

Very impressive for such a LOW price!

 

[jpprod]

Dwight: AFAIK smoke in CS is not created with table fog, it is a multipass transparent particle effect. These consume heaps and bounds of single-texturing fillrate, and there is zero invisible overdraw in them. Thus they're the worst-case scenario for tile-based renrerers with relatively low fillrate, such as Kyro. Radeon's not a very good choise for transparent particle effects either, because it's single-texturing fillrate is only near TNT2 Ultra's level. In this very situation traditional, expensive brute-force accelerators like GeForce2 Ultra or Voodoo5 6000 shine.

Performance of Kyro II looks very impressive. However, I don't think game developers would like if this card sold alot because it lacks hardware T&amp;L as well as most advanced DX8 features. PC platform can only compete with next-generation consoles technically if there is a sizable installed user base with feature-wise competent and somewhat unified graphics hardware.

 

[RoboTECH]

y'know, I'd buy this card, but it has no T&amp;L unit









Ben, put the bat down....BEN!!! PUT THE DAMN BAT DOWN!!!

 

[Braxus]

What I want to see is how it performs in W2K... Also an issue to me is how often ST will be releasing drivers (STEDs?). If they can release drivers as often nVidia does with their NEDs, I'll be jumping on this card quick.

 

[RoboTECH]

but seriously folks.....

that KyroII is one a$$-kicker, is it not??

jeeeeehosefat!!!!

MBTR aside (is it REALLY that stressful of an engine, or is it just coded poorly?), the KyroII is incredible!!!!

how 'bout that FSAA?

how 'bout them UT scores????

I really wish they would've done some tests in UT with the high-res textures. Can the Kyro-II manage that?

ah well, no matter, it'll do DXTC in D3d, which looks great on the 5500.

also, Ben, I noticed something funny....these new benchmarks you've been rallying about (MBTR and Serious Sam)....I noticed that the 5500 seems to do pretty well in comparison to the MX, don't you?

I gotta wait for my new 5500 to arrive so I can test that 1600x1200 score tho, that was weird. hehehe....2 fps....

I really hate the fact that the tester doesn't have the sense to disable T&amp;L for the cards that don't have T&amp;L units in MDK2. that automatically drops your framerate significantly, who the hell plays like that?

stupid....

also of note is the WickedGL drivers work wonders for the 5500 in MDK2, ~30 fps increase (go figure!)

all-in-all, this has COMPLETELY convinced me not to pick up a GTS-U, I wanna wait for the darn full review!

 

[poop]

It is nice to see that the superior technology (IMHO) is starting to pay off. The PowerVR approach is MUCH more complex, but I think better in the long run.

I'll stick with my GeForce DDR for now. I'll hang out for the Kyro III.

 

[Rellik]

Although I was thrilled first, I begin to see similarities between
the launch of the Kyro II and the launch of the Savage 2000. It had cool features(S3TC) but lacked speed. This time it is reversed. Let´s
see what the market and game developpers agree on....

 

[pidge]

It is difficult to develop drivers for Tile Based rendering cards. When Microsoft was expected to announce the XBox with Gigapixel's video chip inside, NVIDIA was able to get the design win because they were able to provide Microsoft with a working model. I talked to some of the people from Gigapixel and they kept telling me how hard it was and how they had gone through many delays because of it and that was the cause for them losing the XBox contract. Nevertheless, for $149, I shouldn't really be complaining. The hardware and technology is very impressive.