AnandTech's KyroII Review

[BFG10K]

I am thinking very seriously about getting this card as an upgrade for my GF2 MX. The price/performance/features of this card is nothing short of spectacular.

BenSkywalker:

If T&L is so critical for the Kyro2 to have, can you please explain to me why the Kyro 2 without a T&L engine (in CPU limited situations in Quake 3 and Serious Sam) is spanking the competing boards with T&L engines? Quite obviously there must be something wrong with the competitors' implementation. Either that, or T&L isn't as good as everyone says it is.

And let's face it, if you buy a 64 MB Radeon or a 64 MB GF2/GF2 Ultra, you'll be looking to play high resolution gaming, right? In that case the Kyro 2 wins even more victories.

I think it's a serious fallacy to dismiss this board soley on the grounds that it doesn't have a T&L engine. Tile based rendering is awesome and will quite likely be the highlight of 2001 video card scene.

 

[darth maul]

RoboTECH, stop posting lies, and stop swearing this is a family forum.

Sorry to interupt your conversation with ben here, but no an SDR will not score the same as a GF2 no matter what res and/or config file.

And while your at it, explain to me again why we should be seeing benchmarks for 1.17 again? And as I said, maybe just maybe, we should go back to bytemark so we can compare how good these things really are compared to moms old P90!

Open your eyes doood....

 

[RoboTECH]

darth, really, lighten up. you took what I said and really got out of hand.

an SDR will break 200 fps easily in Q3. Is there much of a difference between 250 fps and 300?

not really.

as far as seeing 1.17 benchmarks, I didn't say we SHOULD see them, I said the reason we are seeing them is so anandtech doesn't have to redo every single benchmark they ran on 1.17 for comparison's sake.

and the P90 exaggeration....really now.... geez...why do I always attract the kids?

 

[BenSkywalker]

"If T&L is so critical for the Kyro2 to have, can you please explain to me why the Kyro 2 without a T&L engine (in CPU limited situations in Quake 3 and Serious Sam) is spanking the competing boards with T&L engines?"

If you play Quake3 and SS then it isn't. T&L is an edge, although slight, in both titles, the scores in that particular review don't reflect it because they ran all the benches in 32bit(the GF2MX at the very least isn't CPU bound). In the most CPU bound case in Quake3 the Kyro is getting beaten by a decent margin by the DDR GF2 boards, 14+FPS minimum. In SS the same thing happens, though with the much higher fillrate requirements in fill the margin is much smaller. I wouldn't call the Kyro2 losing in the most CPU intensive, out of what they had posted, situations in those games spanking the competition.

"Quite obviously there must be something wrong with the competitors' implementation. Either that, or T&L isn't as good as everyone says it is."

Did you notice the MDK2 scores? That is a game that utilizes the T&L unit fairly well(though they should have definately upped the poly counts considerably for when T&L was enabled).

"And let's face it, if you buy a 64 MB Radeon or a 64 MB GF2/GF2 Ultra, you'll be looking to play high resolution gaming, right? In that case the Kyro 2 wins even more victories."

One victory. Look at UT, the KyroII is beaten soundly in the highest resolution by all the DDR GF2 boards along with the V5 and doesn't fair much better in the lower settings above 640x480 32bit. But of course, that is an older game. MDK2 the GF2 DDR boards all best the KyroII at every setting, including the fill limited 1600x1200 32bit. In Quake3, overall the KyroII is slotted between the GTS and GF2Pro(does fairly well there). In MBTR the KyroII gets b!tch slapped by the DDR GF2 boards again. On top of the poor performance in that game, the fix for the problem they were having slows performance down moreso.

If you take SS out of the picture, the KyroII really doesn't look all that great(though it certainly doesn't look bad by any stretch). For ~$150 I would definately pick up a GF2. I know exactly how the games I'm playing deal without hardware T&L. I can play Giants faster at 1600x1200 32bit with T&L enabled then I can @640x480 without(neither of which are really playable).

"I think it's a serious fallacy to dismiss this board soley on the grounds that it doesn't have a T&L engine. Tile based rendering is awesome and will quite likely be the highlight of 2001 video card scene."

Not the KyroII, and not until they fix some of the problems with geometric throughput. Tile based ships, at least all of them to date, svck with high geometry loads. Please don't take my word for it, have anyone with a Kyro or KyroII run through any poly test and watch what happens. Compare it to any traditional using software or hardware, it doesn't matter. Having a strong T&L unit on the KyroII as it is now wouldn't help you too much, the chip itself is far and away the bottleneck. I'll tell you now that whatever board is the biggest hit of 2001 will be a DX8 board. It may well be someone besides nVidia, it could possibly be a tiler, but that won't be the most important factor by a long shot.

Right now the KyroII is the anti-T&L chip in some ways. Not only does it not help push things forward, it is a step back compared to traditionals. This is one of the reasons why the Gigapixel technology was so interesting, it was supposed to have fixed the problem that all tilers have had to date.

Also of note, the GF3, and I would assume the rest of the DX8 boards will follow, is built to deal with rendering scenes front to back and "throwing away" everything not visible. This does require software support, but nVidia is the "king" at the moment and also occupying the overwhelming majority of developers systems so support is fairly certain(not to mention not that difficult). At that point, a "tiler" won't have anywhere near the edge in terms of eliminating overdraw that it does now versus traditionals. It still will have an edge, but as it stands now your GF2MX has twice the raw fill of the KyroII, the state of the art for each opens up a five hundred percent rift. Tilers may well end up on top this year, but many people are under the impression that the traditionals are standing still while that definately is not the case.

If the KyroII hits with a street price of ~$120 then it will be a strong alternative in the "high end budget" market against the GTS and 32MB DDR Radeon. I like seeing a third major player in the market and hope they do break into the mainstream PC vid card market, I have more faith that they will continue to improve then I do in ATi.


Robo

it'll be interesting to see if Kyro2 has a worthwhile T&L unit. Hope so.

You mean the Kyro3?

RE: the MX and AGP texturing, I would think framerates would be even lower than they were if they had that much texturing to do. I"m not half as disappointed iwth the 5500's scores as I am surprised by the MX's scores (FSAA). I still think they're wrong.

12MB frame buffer leaves the V5 with ~26MB texture memory. Figure there is 30MB of textrues and the MX would have to swap 10MB of textures at ~1GB/sec versus 4MB of textures for the V5 at 133MB/sec. To equal out in that situation the GF2MX would need to be "swapping" nearly 32MB of textures to match how the strain on the V5 with 4MB through PCI texturing. Course, that is still just theory(I will be running through some testing with it today).

BTW- You have to pick SS up when it hits the shelves. Goold old fashioned Doom style gameplay with sh!tloads of monsters coming at you from everywhere. Unlike Doom, you do have a lot of wide open spaces on top of the corridor type areas. The current SS bench is a flyby(you can see for "miles" in some parts), I expect the retail version will have a new bench with some action going on. The game plays fast, real fast too. Don't judge it by the benchmark, the flyby is by far the slowest part of the "game" in terms of FPS(not really part of the game, it's like Unreal's flyby except in ancient Egypt). Oh yeah, did I mention it is launching at $20?(Well within your price range).

 

[oldfart]

I think SS supposed to hit the stores on 3/20. I've also heard the shipping version is supposed to be 20% faster than test2.

 

[TravisBickle]

you dudes are so conservative it's pathetic!... or did I mean conversative
we have a new card with some dx8 features which urinates on the GTS/Ultra from a great height for a measly $150! wake up dudes! listen to yourself in these threads!
"ur, assuming the drivers work right, it's got a lot of promise...the next card with T&L is going could be very tempting..."
duh! there hardly many more games with T&L than there were video card models! T&L is the biggest hoax of all time, good only for 13 year olds to massage themselves over as they think about their 3d mark scores.
are you too proud or stick-in-the-mud to give up the idea that this card might be better than the GTS? yep, i think it will be better. maybe not better enough to change up to from a GTS until a next gen card gets here.
and as for 1600x1200? 2048x1536? get real. unless you have a 26" monitor you can't resolve that resolution truely. you might THINK you can, but technically you can't.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Travis-

"we have a new card with some dx8 features"

Nothing above a GeForce SDR from 1999 that I can think of.

"which urinates on the GTS/Ultra from a great height for a measly $150!"

Loses in four out of five games for the tests we have seen, utterly humiliated in two of them.

"duh! there hardly many more games with T&L than there were video card models! T&L is the biggest hoax of all time, good only for 13 year olds to massage themselves over as they think about their 3d mark scores."

Name one 3D game that has come out this year that doesn't use hardware T&L. For that matter, list every single non T&L using game you can think of for the last three months of last year too. See, I play current games, and a decent variety of them. I can switch hardware T&L on and off on my system and see the results right in front of me. I didn't need to see the KyroII get obliterated in MDK2 and MBTR to know that missing T&L on certain games is a major issue right now.

Besides all that, I work with 3D visualization where hardware T&L is an absolute requirement. All of Pixars movies from the last several years have been designed on hardware T&L equipped systems, along with JurassicPark, the StarWars re-releases and Episode1, Stuart Little, he!l I could dig up hundreds of movies, TV shows, music videos and commercials that owe part of their design to a hardware T&L equipped PC. You saying they are all 13 year old kids who drool over a benchmark? I'm sure they give a sh!t when they pick up their six figure royalty check that someone hates the fact that they need hardware T&L to be anywhere near as productive as they are.

"are you too proud or stick-in-the-mud to give up the idea that this card might be better than the GTS?"

I know what games I play. I've seen how these games perform on the latest and greatest systems with and without T&L. I know I plan on sticking with a hardware T&L board. I also know how well the Kyro does at handling large geometry loads. I know that the V3(yes, the Voodoo3) can even best it there. Tilers to date(including the KyroII) have some design issues to be worked around. Until they fix them and add T&L then I have no intention of getting one.

"and as for 1600x1200? 2048x1536? get real. unless you have a 26" monitor you can't resolve that resolution truely. you might THINK you can, but technically you can't."

Do you understand how graphics are sent and displayed to the monitor? It doesn't matter whether or not you have the required pixel density, the image uploaded to the monitor will be a more detailed image running at higher resolution resulting in a crisper image. If you can't see that, you have problems with your eyes

Besides all that, as I have been saying for a year now(go ahead and do a search if you like), my next upgrade will be a fully DX8 compliant part no matter who makes it, no matter if it is a traditional or "tiler", it will be a full DX8 board. If S3 released a fully DX8 compliant part tomorrow that happened to be a tiler with a good T&L engine(without the geometric throughput issues of a "tiler&quot on it and good OGL drivers I'd buy it without issues.

 

[KevinH]

Ben, a question for you. The way I see it, this card is like a GF2 stripped of DDR AND T&L yet still manages to kick som eserious ass. Do you think the inclusion of these two features will be a significant boost? If so...sheesh.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Kevin-

"Ben, a question for you. The way I see it, this card is like a GF2 stripped of DDR AND T&L yet still manages to kick som eserious ass. Do you think the inclusion of these two features will be a significant boost? If so...sheesh."

DDR, not with this chip. That's not a bad thing, in fact that is one of the big benefits of the design. "Tilers" need a he!l of a lot less bandwith then traditionals.

On the flip side, I don't know how hardware T&L would help this chip all that much. I have seen several comments that there is technology that works around some issues that deferred renderers have always had. I expect that it will be a completely new DX8 compliant part that has the T&L unit and hopefuly at that point they will be utilizing technology that works around the weak geometric throughput of tilers to date.

Thing that bothers me the most about this board is the lack of T&L and it does show up quite clearly in some of the benches that were run.

 

[skace]

Hey Ben, speaking of SS, did you play the test? The only problem with a game like this seems to be the lag! I kept getting out of sync errors like something out of age of empires. I'm on adsl and boy that game hits where it hurts.

As far as the Kyro2 goes, I'm sticking with my Geforce1 until something real cool comes along (maybe gf3, maybe not). I don't see any huge benefits from making the jump from GF1 to Kyro2. Considering I didn't spend that much on my GF1 in the first place and I've had it for a year, I don't think this is too great of a card.

 

[DaveB3D]

(without the geometric throughput issues of a "tiler&quot

Alright Tim Sweeney, don't talk about so called "issues" that don't exist.

 

[TravisBickle]

Ben I'm sorry a bit of trolling has taken up so much of your typing!
ok, the KyroII isn't the HOTTEST card in those benchmarks, out of 8 contenders the card is at:
5-5-4-3-1 in the league table of 1024x768 games.
in case nobody has noticed, 4 of those cards are more expensive, and the Kyro II is also beating the absurdly overpriced Ultra in a benchmark.
i honestly don't give a fig about T+L. game developers didn't really like it that much.
what I DO like is 4xfsaa with a 2x or less hit. I bought my voodoo for fsaa, fsaa is important dudes, wake up, we can't get much more out of monitors. we have a video card that works like a video card should, without stoneage overdraw. i don't think nvidia hasn't done anything as comparable for the industry; they just piled on transistors at every opportunity for brute force and claimed performance the cards couldn't deliver...4 pipelines etc.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Dave-

Uhhhhhh......

"Deferred rendering is well known for the ability to display scenes very efficiently. An example of this is Gigapixel's design and technology. However, in the next couple of years these architectures are going to run into the problem of having to bin large amounts of much geometry data."

I have to keep trying to get it out of you how they are going to work around this

Travis-

", wake up, we can't get much more out of monitors. we have a video card that works like a video card should, without stoneage overdraw. i don't think nvidia hasn't done anything as comparable for the industry; they just piled on transistors at every opportunity for brute force and claimed performance the cards couldn't deliver...4 pipelines etc."

Brute force works, and better then deferred to date. Also, even the &quot;brutish&quot; company has some quite effective overdraw elimination included. It does require developer support but with their current position in the PC market and X-Box that is a fairly safe bet. As far as monitors go, well &quot;Dinosaur&quot; and <wait for it Robo> &quot;Toy Story&quot;<there it is> look a fvck of a lot better running at 640x480 on my monitor then any game running any sort of FSAA I have ever seen. But, do you think that the KyroII is going to be anywhere near the GF3 in FSAA performance? I highly doubt it(though it is much cheaper).

 

[RoboTECH]

HELL YEAH BABEEY!!

TOY STORY RAWKS!!!

 

[BenSkywalker]

Hehehe,

Being completely honest here, my kids are currently more interested in 3DMark2K1 then they are any of their movies(even ToyStory).

&quot;Daddy play the dragon game again&quot;

(Their words..... over and over and over and over)

Have you DLed the bench yet Robo? I know how highly you think of it as a benchmark, but you gotta check out the included demo(the rolling one with music etc). The &quot;nature scene&quot; in particular, extremely impressive.

 

[RoboTECH]

i have heard that you can play a racing game demo, so i'l prolly download it. <G>

i've heard it is quite impressive, except that me and my horrid connex prolly will choke



hey, go here and answer my question, willya? I'm leaning toward 10.80

 

[Rellik]

Ben, what is your take on FSAA?

After the hype around FSAA started, I the first thing I checked was how it was supposed to work on a hardware/software level. I came to the conclusion that it could lead to blurring effects or to be precise: A visual loss in quality. I checked the screenshots. True,
the aliasing lines were suppressed. But at what price! The text in NFSorsche(the favorite example) was certainly looking as if I traded
my V3 (now Radeon) for a Herc GF card. Most of the people that used
FSAA said that the screenshots did not provide a good example. As
soon as my Radeon was installed, i tried FSAA in Q3. Maybe it was a bug, but NOTHING changed. I will try Nfs Porsche soon. I know that the FSAA on the Radeon, GF and V5 are quite different, but for now my point stands: FSAA is a useless feature for those who crave best quality. The only way to improve the aliasing problem is, IMHO, higher
resolutions like 1280*960 and maybe proper implementation of anisotropic filtering...

your take ben?

Robo, comment if you like..you are one that happens to &quot;like&quot; FSAA, right?

 

[RoboTECH]

I think FSAA is very worthwhile in some games, not so worthwhile in other games

I have owned 3 5500's and 3 GTS cards, and it's my opinion that NFS-Porsche is an outstanding example of what FSAA can do, and Q3 is not.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

Look for everybody that seems to doubt the impressiveness of the kyro II, mainly Ben Skywalker who seems to have a heavy bias towards nvidia, remember that the card only costs $150 dollars for the 64 MB version. The card is also conservatively clocked compared to the highend geforces too. Now, the next iteration of Kyro will be VERY impressive. All the kyro needs to do now is ensure 100 percent compatibility with all major games and no video artifacting. The win2k drivers are excellent, scoring nearly identical to win98 drivers, so they don't need help there. also 2D quality is good, better than geforce. This card will absolutely rule the low end budget gaming sector of the market.

 

[DaveB3D]

Well even consider KYRO2.. Did a few tests and compared them to V5 in 3Dmark2000... using the two high detail scenes KYRO2 came out faster than the V5 (granted, the V5 numbers I'm comparing it to were with older drivers, but the point is still there...).

 

[moocat]

Isn't the fact that people are comparing the lastest generation of cards to the V5 a very nice complement to 3DFX?

 

[gogeeta13]

best part about this is another huge contender(like radeon) to push the geforces even lower. capitalism and competition is such a great thing. just think if the athlon never happened. we would be paying $2000 for a p4.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Skace-

Sorry I didn't respond to you last time, mush have missed your post all together(you gotta be a long winded SOB to get notice around here most of the time).

Yes I have played the test quite a bit, but not online. If you are having trouble on broadband I would be toasted on my (lousy @ss)56K. I'm with you holding onto my GeForce1 for right now, at least for a little bit longer

Robo-

You can only play the game if you purchase the &quot;Pro&quot; version unfortunately. I'd still dl it just to check out the visuals on the Demo portion(nature scene ownz joo:Q) I got the full dl right off without problem on my first shot, extremely odd as I probably have a worse connection then you do

Dave-

So what are those extra 2million transistors for?? What are they doing to work around the binning issue with high geometry loads? I have to keep shooting off at the mouth until you tell me d@mnit[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-happy.gif[/img]

What kind of numbers are you getting in 2K1 with those two boards btw Dave?

Rellik-

&quot;Ben, what is your take on FSAA?&quot;

I'm with you for the most part. Robo is definately right that a game like NFS4 benefits a great deal more then something like Quake3 where IMHO it is worse for gameplay being on. Any sim type game that doesn't support mip mapping, or has poor mip mapping, truly does benefit from having it enabled. Running NFS4 I definately go 8x6x4 instead of 16x12x0, but that is an exception.

Overall, I'll take higher res in 99%+ of the games I play. If a board offers some good texture filtering in hardware that eliminates the texture aliasing in titles like NFS4 then I wouldn't use FSAA at all. &quot;Jaggies&quot; to me are definately better dealt with by upping the res then by utilizing FSAA.

FOr Quake3/UT type games I need to see clearly distant targets so I can camp and pick off people without getting my @ss fragged(and pissing of the &quot;Robo&quot; type players greatly). With all that said however, the Radeon's FSAA is the least effective overall with the V5 being the best(well, if we don't count the GF3 which can run higher res and FSAA which looks pretty d@mn sweet).

Oh yeah, been meaning to PM you, it didn't line up for me Looks nice though, I like what you have done a lot

Sudheer Anne-

&quot;Look for everybody that seems to doubt the impressiveness of the kyro II, mainly Ben Skywalker who seems to have a heavy bias towards nvidia, remember that the card only costs $150 dollars for the 64 MB version.&quot;

nVidia bias, no. Hardware T&amp;L bias, HE!L YEAH

Does the fact that you can buy one with 64MB for $150 change my view? No, not at all. If they put out one with 32MB, hardware T&amp;L, a full DX8 fetaure set and charged $300 for it then that would change my view

&quot;The win2k drivers are excellent, scoring nearly identical to win98 drivers, so they don't need help there. also 2D quality is good, better than geforce. This card will absolutely rule the low end budget gaming sector of the market.&quot;

Not sure about that quite yet. At its' price it is going up against the &quot;real&quot; Radeon DDR and GTS, and that's before the GF3 launch. I hope it does well, the more players the better, but you can pick up an OEM Radeon DDR for ~$90 and between the two, even at the same price, I would definately be leaning towards the Radeon.

moocat

&quot;Isn't the fact that people are comparing the lastest generation of cards to the V5 a very nice complement to 3DFX?&quot;

Depends on how you look at it. The KyroII isn't meant as a high end offering, and it is relatively close to the same price point as the V5. The GeForce3 is the latest generation, and comparing a V5 to that isn't going to look like a compliment to 3dfx(particularly not when the Rampage would have been very competitive in all ways).

 

[DaveB3D]

Haven't tried 2001. Until I get a new CPU, I'm not going to waste my time.

Anyone in the Dallas area care to donate one to a good cause?

 

[TravisBickle]

it's easy for people who try fsaa on non v4/5 (RGSS) style cards to not see benefits in fsaa. in fact the Radeon has a habit of turning of fsaa in direct 3d. and the ogss just isn't that effective for a hell of a framerate hit. it's no wonder people underrate fsaa.
true, fsaa is a kind of blurring at least in RGSS. my eyes have to adjust. but it is very useful for a game like Falcon4. have you seen the textures in that? crawl all over the place. with the V5 it's nice to fly just to enjoy the scenery (for 5 minutes anyway).
and that was just the problem with the V5. a lot of people didn't bother to live with RGSS for a while, they just ran a few benchmarks and moaned that the GTS was killing it.
OGSS may be inferior to RGSS, at least it's less effective in what I've seen so far, but hey, i'll take it for a very reduced cost like in the kyroII. with OGSS what you're really getting is gaming at higher resolutions that your monitor can take, and downsampling image.