by FastSite
05/25/2001 | 12:00 AM
The birth of Kyro II baby is directly connected with PowerVR Company, so we think we should first say a few words about this company and the predecessors of Kyro and Kyro II.<%BANNER[article]%>
Well, the beginning of PowerVR's history goes back to the year of 1996, when its first products, PowerVR Series 1, appeared. Together with NEC they launched NEC PX1 and NEC PX2 graphics accelerators. Five years ago there was no active 3D graphics card market, so the companies had different ideas about 3D graphics and looked for their own ways to implement them. NEC PX1 and NEC PX2 didn't gain public recognition and very soon sank into oblivion.
In February 1998 PowerVR announced Series2 products based on tile architecture, which became more successful and were welcome first of all in gaming consoles and machines. In 1998 SEGA chose the PowerVR Series2 architecture to be used in its Dreamcast gaming console, and a bit later the most advanced gaming machine of those days, NAOMI 1, was equipped with several chips from PowerVR Series2. These chips worked in parallel during the scenes rasterization, while geometric calculations were carried out by an additional geometric processor. In August 1999 PowerVR Series2 chips penetrated the PC graphics adapters market. These were NEON 250 graphics cards by VideoLogic Systems built on NEC PowerVR 250 chips, which were manufactured on the basis of PowerVR Series2.
These cards provided excellent image quality, but they suffered from grave problems with the drivers. Moreover, NEC's troubles with the chips manufacturing hampered the mass sales of NEON 250. Thus the tandem of PowerVR and NEC failed once more to enter the PC graphics card market and PowerVR turned to another manufacturer - STMicroelectronics.
The third generation - PowerVR Series3 - was announced in April 1999 and STMicroelectronics, a well-known semiconductor manufacturer, obtained PowerVR's license to use Series3 technologies in PC graphics chips and gaming consoles. In June 2000 STMicroelectronics announced its first chip based on PowerVR Series3 technologies called Kyro, and in September 2000 there were three manufacturers to announce new products built on PowerVR/STM Kyro - VideoLogic Systems, InnoVISION and PowerColor.
Kyro turned out a smart, pretty fast chip, which was unlucky to appear during a confrontation flare-up among NVIDIA, ATI and 3dfx. The price of Kyro based graphics cards made them feel utterly uncomfortable - they were more expensive then the Low-End cards offered by the competitors and slower than the latest high-performance gaming cards, which were pricing only a little bit higher. Again, tile architecture and Kyro itself were rejected by the gaming industry.
However, in March 2000 STMicroelectronics announced the next product based on PowerVR Series3, Kyro II, which was virtually a slight remake of the first Kyro enriched with a couple of modifications and made with a new 0.18micron technology (the migration from 0.25micron to 0.18micron technology allowed to bring up the core clocking from 125MHz to 175MHz). Taking into account that the performance of graphics cards based on tile architecture is strongly determined by the core frequency, this increase in core frequency was supposed to improve the performance and to make Kyro II based graphics cards more competitive.
VideoLogic Systems was the first to manufacture Kyro II based graphics cards and its pilot product was named VideoLogic Vivid!XS. VideoLogic Systems is a branch of Imagination Technologies Group. Alongside with VideoLogic Systems dealing with the production of graphics cards, sound cards and all sorts of multimedia products, Imagination Technologies Group also includes PowerVR Technologies (it develops various algorithms of image creating and processing), Metagence Technologies (this one works on broad-spectrum DSPs - digital signal processors) and Ensigma Technologies (this company develops and licenses to third companies algorithms for audio data processing).
The second company to pay attention to Kyro II became Hercules, recently bought by Guillemot concern. Hercules brand, which boasts excellent reputation in Europe, together with Guillemot's financial and marketing abilities as well as adequate pricing policy can ensure successful promotion of Hercules Kyro II based graphics cards - Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB graphics card was announced on March 9, even earlier than Kyro II chip by STMicroelectronics. We were lucky to get hold of one of these cards, so here is the review.
We'll discuss the card a bit later, and now let us focus on Kyro II chip itself.
Key specs of Kyro II chip look as follows:
Well, the chip looks a bit too modest compared with the modern graphics cards features, but its image creating principles are absolutely different, so it doesn't fit conventional performance standards like the number of megahertz, pixel pipelines and texturing units.
Kyro II is built on the so-called tile architecture. The idea is that the image is built not as a whole, as it happens by common graphics accelerators, but in tiles, that is, the screen is split into fragments of 32x16 pixels in size, which are called tiles, where parts of a scene are built one after another. Kyro II builds a scene in consecutive order: first is builds an image within one fragment (tile), then it passes over to another one and so on, tile by tile, till the scene is completed.
An image within a single tile is built in the following way:
When Kyro II receives the whole list of polygons in the scene, it defines for each tile, which of the polygons covers it partially or completely and makes individual lists of such polygons for each particular tile. After that for all the tile pixels the smallest distances (Z coordinates) are saved and the numbers of triangles, to which these distances correspond, are defined. Z-coordinates are checked not for only one pixel per clock but for 32 pixels of a tile simultaneously (Z32 comparisons per clock), so this stage of rendering takes considerably less time. Only after all the tile polygons are built, all the closest pixels (those which are to be eventually textured) are singled out with the help of the tile Z-buffer and the numbers of corresponding polygons are defined, the actual texturing of these pixels begins. After that, a ready image, which makes part of the full-screen image, is transferred to the frame buffer stored in the graphics memory.
The most exciting thing to mark is that the small tile frame buffer of Kyro II, the tile Z-buffer, the buffer with the stored numbers of the textured polygons for each tile pixel and all sorts of buffers needed to create some image within a tile - all this stuff is integrated into the chip core as common caches, and almost all the image creating operations take place in the core. Most of the data, such as the Z-buffer data, for instance, which transfer between the core and the graphics memory would slow down any conventional graphics card, also circulates within the core of Kyro II.
Thanks to tile architecture the chip addresses the local graphics memory very rarely as long as more or less significant amounts of data are transferred via the memory bus only by tile pixel texturing when the core requests textures from the graphics memory or by transferring the ready image from the tile frame buffer to the general frame buffer. We tried to illustrate our explanation in the following way:
Moreover, the peculiarities of the chip architecture save it time and trouble texturing invisible surfaces, i.e. Kyro II simply doesn't waste time on that. As a result, there are fewer textures transferred to the graphics core, which makes the data transfer rate along the graphics memory bus not so vital any more.
Of course, tile architecture is no absolute perfection. It doesn't consist only of advantages. For example, before building a scene Kyro II should obtain the data about all its polygons while a conventional graphics accelerator textures the polygons one after another as soon as it receives them. Such a peculiarity makes Kyro II suffer performance losses in some games. This way, if the developers have designed their gaming engine for ordinary graphics accelerators, then on building a scene the engine may send a portion of polygons (say, describing some room) to the accelerator, because it "expects" that the accelerator will process and texture them at once. And in the meanwhile the processor is supposed to calculate the moving objects parameters or the gaming logic and when it is through it sends another portion of polygons (say, determining the models of the game characters in that room) to the accelerator. An ordinary accelerator will process them right away and complete the scene. But Kyro II will take a different way. It will wait until it gets the entire list of polygons that determine the gaming scene and only then it will start building the image.
Another shortcoming of tile based rendering, which looks much more like an inevitable historical factor, is that game developers fairly assume that hidden surfaces texturing is not the best way to improve the fps rate. So, they try hard to decrease Overdraw value as greatly as possible (just in case you forgot: Overdraw is a measure of how many times a pixel is drawn for each frame rendered). As a result, they remove the hidden surfaces on the software level already. It affects the performance when we speak of ordinary 3D graphics cards, but tile based accelerators lose the efficiency of their hardware hidden surface removal technology.
Another point that can negatively affect the performance of tile based graphics cards is the necessity to define a list of polygons that refers to each particular tile. We can't disregard this fact because the average number of polygons in a contemporary gaming scene is constantly growing.
Moreover, alongside with all the highs and lows of tile architecture, Kyro II chip itself has a number of both: pleasant and upsetting traits. We'll tackle them in the section titled "3D Image Quality". And now we suggest speaking a bit about Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB graphics card, which is the key figure of the today's review.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 graphics card is shipped in a retail package designed in Hercules's traditional way: with typical colors and design elements. On the front side of the box there is a "handsome" colored face of some Viking or an Indian. A nice guy, anyway:
By the way, it's no new design - we saw similar faces on the boxes with 3dfx's products. So, as long as 3dfx doesn't exist any longer, such box design can be viewed as a contrast to NVIDIA. Whatever the reason, we like a picture like that much better than various airplanes and other technical stuff.
The package includes Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 graphics card and a CD with drivers. The card's PCB is made of blue-green textolite and is rather huge, we should say:
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Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 has a Kyro II chip and 64MB 128bit graphics memory (8 chips made by SAMSUNG):
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The core and the graphics memory have synchronous clocking equal to 175MHz. The core is equipped with a brand Hercules cooler resembling a bit to the Blue Orb by Thermaltake.
It is our considered opinion that the cooler by Hercules is not so powerful as Blue Orb, though it produces notably less noise. In fact, we have noticed that the holes for cooler fastening are located too close to the core, making it impossible to install Blue Orb. But it won't be needed anyway: the Hercules cooler is quite enough to dissipate the emitted heat.
The PCB also has a special spot for a chip displaying the images in TV-format via S-Video or a composite Out and one more spot for another chip working as a TMDS transmitter to the DVI-Out. However, Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 doesn't have these output ports, so the chips aren't installed and there is no corresponding layout for them.
For our investigation we assembled the following testbed:
We used the following software:
Here are the drivers we used in our tests:
The driver by Imagination Technologies for Kyro/Kyro II lets adjust some properties of the graphics card:
Apart from the general card settings, you can create profiles for each application:
The driver stores the settings for each application in the registry:
We left all the cards settings by default except Vsync: graphics synchronization was disabled. In Quake3 Arena for 16bit color modes we took 16bit textures and for 32bit modes the textures quality was set to 32bit. Texture and details quality was set to the maximum, while all the other settings were left by default. We tested in demo127.dem which is included in 127g point release patch.
For Unreal Tournament we selected top texture and skin quality, enabled "Show Decals" option and dynamic lighting. In the additional Direct3D settings we enabled volumetric fog and reflecting surfaces. All the other settings were left default. We tested in utbench.dem.
For Serious Sam we tried two test modes: with "Speed" and "Quality" graphics and all other default settings. We tested in DemoSP03.dem.
In Giants we left the settings for all graphics cards at default. We used the benchmark integrated into Giants game.
Tests in 3DMark2001we run with default settings. For 16bit color modes we enabled 16bit textures and 16bit Z-buffer depth, and for 32bit modes we set 32bit textures and 24bit Z-buffer. Graphics cards with a T&L unit were tested in "D3D Hardware T&L" mode. For all the rest we set "D3D Software T&L" mode.
For a better comparison of the performances we opposed Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 to ATI RADEON DDR 64MB VIVO with 183MHz core and 183MHz memory frequencies, SUMA Platinum GeForce2 MX400 based on NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 with 32MB 128bit SDRAM and SUMA PLATINUM GeForce2 GTS 64MB with 64MB 128bit DDR SDRAM and 200MHz core and 333MHz graphics memory frequencies.
In addition to these graphics cards we also pro9vide the results obtained for Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra graphics card based on NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra in some tests.
Besides all the advantages of tile architecture, Kyro II possesses a few more noteworthy abilities, which we are going to highlight now.
Firstly, Kyro II carries out all color calculations and texturing operations with 32bit precision regardless of the graphics mode set or the format of the processed textures (Internal True Color). Sometimes, it allows avoiding quality worsening, for example in 16bit modes when the objects containing transparent textures are laid one over another, some errors may occur. Kyro II is free from this problem, because all the operations are made in a 32bit color mode. A frame is changed to 16bit mode only when a completed part of the image is transferred from the tile buffer to the general frame buffer. Now we will try to illustrate the process we have just described. On the left, you can see screenshots from Unreal Tournament in 16bit and 32bit color modes received from Kyro II, on the right - the shots obtained for GeForce2 MX400:
| 16bit - Kyro II | 16bit - GeForce2 |
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| 32bit - Kyro II | 32bit - GeForce2 |
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With the help of the same Unreal Tournament benchmarks, let us check the quality of dithering in 16bit mode:
| 16bit - Kyro II | 16bit - GeForce2 |
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From these screenshots we can easily deduce that the image quality provided by Kyro II in 16bit modes is undoubtedly its strong point. We guess that 16bit dithering by Kyro II is made with a 4x4 pixel matrix, which generates some kind of typical "grids" in 16bit modes. Dithering by GeForce2 results into repeating 16x16 pixel squares. Although in this case we found no evident quality differences, we liked Kyro II better in dynamic 16bit scenes and GeForce2 in static ones.
The second curious issue concerning Kyro II is the support of full-screen anti-aliasing by means of supersampling. Moreover, Kyro II is smart enough to perform two-sample (2x) horizontal anti-aliasing (2x1), two-sample (2x) vertical anti-aliasing (1x2) and four-sample (2x2 or 4x) anti-aliasing. To compare the quality of full-screen anti-aliasing carried out by Kyro II and its rivals, we would like to offer you some screenshots from Homeworld: Cataclysm shots were made in 800x600x32 mode with enabled supersampling (Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 competing):
| No Supersampling | Supersampling 2x by GeForce2 |
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Supersampling 1x2 by Kyro II | Supersampling 2x1 by Kyro II |
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Supersampling 2x2 by Kyro II | Supersampling 4x by GeForce2 |
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Don't miss the fact that Kyro II implements full-screen anti-aliasing not in the same manner as ordinary graphics accelerators. Say, we enable 2x2 supersampling. In this case the ordinary accelerators will build the image in a 4 times enlarged buffer and then sample, average and transfer the final image to the frame buffer. Kyro II in its turn builds the image tile by tile in the tile buffer, and then, before transferring the image to the frame buffer, reduces the image size sampling and averaging pixel colors in a 2x2 square. Note that for this purpose Kyro II transfers considerably smaller amounts of data along the memory bus, because it doesn't need an enlarged frame buffer and Z-buffer.
Thus we can anticipate that Kyro II will suffer smaller losses by full-screen anti-aliasing than common graphics cards. The results obtained in Quake3 Arena will allow you to assess Kyro II performance with enabled supersampling. The settings remained just as we described in the "Test Methods" section of the article but in this particular case for all the cards we used bi-linear filtering (in the very end of this section we'll explain why):
Notice a curious fact: Kyro II does 2x1 full-screen anti-aliasing a little bit faster than 1x2 anti-aliasing. Perhaps, this slight difference is caused by the peculiarities of the Kyro II core. As for the performance, it is obviously limited by the fillrate but not by the memory bus bandwidth, since the performance falls negligibly when we shift from 16bit to 32bit color mode. GeForce2 GTS has made the most of its comparatively faster texturing speed to show a higher result in 16bit mode, but it fell behind Kyro II in 32bit mode. It seems, that the insufficient graphics memory bus bandwidth choked GeForce2 GTS, just look at a dramatic performance drop by GeForce2 GTS when we passed over from 16bit to 32bit color mode!
Kyro II supports bump mapping by means of EMBM and Dot3 while GeForce2 supports only Dot3. Not so log ago EMBM was a privilege of Matrox's graphics cards only, but nowadays a considerable number of accelerators can support this function and it is very often implemented in modern games. Here are EMBM screenshots taken in 3DMark2001 and Battlezone 2: Combat Commander (with and without EMBM):
 EMBM in 3DMark2001 | |
 Battlezone2 with EMBM by Kyro II |  Battlezone2 without EMBM |
Dot3 bump mapping can be illustrated by 3DMark2001:
 Dot3 by Kyro II |  Dot3 by GeForce2 |
Dot3 by Kyro II is partially ill-implemented: by GeForce2 MX this intricate "bun" is lit by two light sources of different colors, while by Kyro II it is lit by only one not color light source. Maybe, it's a drawback of Direct3D-part of Kyro II driver, or poor implementation of Dot3 technology in the core.
Kyro II also supports tri-linear and anisotropic texture filtering. Moreover, the driver allows forcible enabling of these options. In OpenGL you may force enabling anisotropic filtering only, and in Direct3D it can be done with both tri-linear and anisotropic filtering. Forcible enabling works perfectly for both types of filtering in Direct3D, but in OpenGL in Quake3 enabled anisotropic filtering didn't bring any noticeable changes: the performance remained unchanged as well as texture filtering quality. The same thing happened when we launched Unreal Tournament and Homeworld: Cataclysm in OpenGL. Anisotropic filtering began to work only in Serious Sam thanks to the game engine: in OpenGL it supports anisotropic filtering and may need it enabled. The results obtained in Serious Sam show how good Kyro II is at tri-linear and anisotropic texture filtering:
| Bi-linear filtering | Tri-linear filtering |
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| With mip-levels highlight | |
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| Scene fragments | |
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Anisotropic filtering | Anisotropic + Tri-linear filtering |
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| With mip-levels highlight | |
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| Scene fragments | |
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In spite of the troubles encountered in OpenGL, in Direct3D anisotropic filtering worked well. In order to check Kyro II performance when tri-linear and anisotropic filtering were enabled, we resorted to Unreal Tournament:
Tri-linear filtering enabled by Kyro II has hardly caused any noticeable performance drop at low resolutions, because at low resolutions the performance is restricted not by the graphics card, but by the CPU and the system as a whole. At high resolutions we registered a 28% performance decrease. The phenomenon is easy to explain: Kyro II is equipped with only two pixel pipelines (with one texturing unit each).
Anisotropic filtering has proven a too complicated task for Kyro II. When we enabled it at 1600x1200 resolution, the performance dropped 2.5 times. And with anisotropic and tri-linear filtering enabled the performance of Kyro II plunged even deeper. Enabling both: anisotropic and tri-linear texture filtering provides the highest image quality, but at the same time it requires a lot of calculations to be carried out, so two texturing units of Kyro II are obviously not enough to cope with all the calculations. We consulted the registry and alongside with the driver settings we found a mention about a command, which should enable tri-linear approximation - a faster but less thorough way to smoothen the borders between different mip-levels. The option didn't work, however. Perhaps, it is locked in the driver, or the chip itself doesn't support tri-linear approximation at all. We hope that new driver versions for Kyro II will improve the situation in the future.
Now it's high time we took a closer look at the fastness of Kyro II.
Keeping in mind how greatly the performance drops with tri-linear filtering enabled, we decided to run the tests in Quake3 Arena with both: bi-linear and tri-linear filtering:
Bilinear filtering helped Kyro II to catch up with GeForce2 GTS in 32bit color mode, but in 16bit mode, where the memory bus was loaded not so heavily, Kyro II fell behind GeForce2 GTS.
When we enabled tri-linear texture filtering, Kyro II showed the lowest performance in 16bit color mode and in 32bit mode it slightly outperformed GeForce2 MX 400.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 didn't experience a striking twist in performance as it passed from 16bit to 32bit color mode. It lets us assume that at high resolutions Kyro II's performance is limited by insufficient fillrate.
At this stage we expanded the number of racers and added Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra graphics card. Its core and memory were clocked at the same 175MHz as those of Kyro II. Like Kyro II, NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra chip has two pixel pipelines (with one texturing unit each) and has no hardware T&L unit. So, it may come in handy to compare the performance of Kyro II and TNT2 Ultra working at the same frequencies and to find out the weak points of Kyro II.
Game 1 - Car Chase:
Game 2 - Dragothic:
Game 3 - Lobby:
Game 1 - Car Chase:
Game 2 - Dragothic:
Game 3 - Lobby:
Kyro II has demonstrated astonishing results: in all the gaming tests except "Dragothic" in low-detail mode Kyro II goes abreast with GeForce2 MX, but as the resolution grows in 32bit mode Kyro II surpasses GeForce2 GTS, which appeared possible due to the advantages of the chip tile architecture, no doubt.
But what do we see in high detail mode in "Dragothic" benchmark? In this case the performance of Kyro II depends neither on the resolution, nor on the color depth, but something restricts it heavily. In high detail mode in "Car Chase" Kyro II is even slower than TNT2 Ultra!
Well, we'll make an attempt to spell it out.
The main difference between "High Detail" and "Low Detail" modes is the number of polygons that doubles in all the gaming tests. The amount of textures doubles too and some objects are overlaid by more texture layers.
If the local graphics memory were unable to store all the textures, they'd be transferred via AGP. But for these tests the top amount of textures per frame is 36MB (for 32bit color mode of "Car Chase"). It's by all means not enough to make the 64MB Kyro II transfer the textures via AGP bus. Moreover, if it were so, the results in 16bit and 32bit modes would differ greatly, since 16bit textures occupy two times less space. However, we didn't notice any striking difference: Kyro II gave nearly the same performance in high-detail mode regardless of the color depth.
You won't scare Kyro II by the necessity to lay a large number of textures: it can lay up to 8 textures per pass. Besides the test results would be greatly determined by the resolution, which is also not the case of Kyro II.
There are only two parameters left, which could have an influence like that on the performance: polygons transfer rate via AGP bus and polygons processing speed provided by the chip's core. Let's turn to "Dragothic" test, which doesn't load the CPU with extra calculations having nothing to do with the scene creation. In high-detail mode an average scene comprises about 100 thousand polygons. Kyro II makes circa 16 frames per second. It means that in a second the chip transfers approximately 100,000 x 16 polygons to the graphics card. If we suppose that the polygons were transferred as stripes, it will take about 50Bytes to describe each triangle, i.e. the graphics card receives an average of 100,000 x 50 x 16Bytes per second (it makes 80 million Bytes of polygon data). On the other hand, Wcpuid utility indicated that Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 based on Kyro II worked in AGP 2x mode with enabled SBA (side band addressing). In this case, AGP bus bandwidth is 66,000,000 x 4 x 2 = 532 million Bytes per second. As you see, the figures are too different even if we consider all the assumptions and inaccuracies. So, the conclusion is that AGP bus bandwidth doesn't restrain the performance of Kyro II.
The only factor left is the speed of polygons processing in the core. Don't miss the fact that tile architecture makes Kyro II chip sort the polygons before building a scene. So, this specific trait acts as a restrictive factor for Kyro II performance when the chip undergoes the tests with a big number of polygons.
We used a synthetic benchmark called "High Polygon Count" from 3DMark2001 to illustrate this idea. The Kyro II was clocked at 175MHz and 185MHz:
By the way, the dinosaurs from this test consist of so many polygons that now and then the lists of tile polygons in the core get overfilled and arouse some artifacts:
 High Polygon Count by Kyro II |  Enlarged fragment |
In Unreal Tournament Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 boasted higher performance than NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS (even in 16bit mode, not to mention 32-bit). This occurred due to relatively few polygons per scene in Unreal Tournament combined with pretty high Overdraw value. Furthermore, we enabled bi-linear filtering giving Kyro II a chance to beat its competitors.
In this test Kyro II gets close to GeForce2 MX only at the highest resolutions in 32bit color mode. If you wish to make the system show polygons (the level is built of) and stripes (specially arranged groups of polygons the models are built of), you need to enter the following commands: wld_bShowPolygons=1 and mdl_bShowStripes=1:
According to these screenshots, we can conclude that the Overdraw is quite low while the number of polygons is quite high, therefore, Kyro II "feels ill-at-ease" as it has to wait for the CPU to provide it with all the polygons of the scene and then to sort them before building the scene. Worse still, the absence of T&L unit also limits the performance of Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 in Serious Sam.
In this game Kyro II doesn't boast high performance either, because the number of polygons is big enough. Then, Giants is designed for graphics cards with T&L unit and all the graphics cards we selected for our investigation (except Hercules 3D Prophet 4500) have hardware T&L unit.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 offers high quality 2D graphics: we increased the resolution up to 1600x1200 and noticed no blurring effect. To assess 2D graphics quality of Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 we used two displays - ViewSonic P775 and Samsung Syncmaster 900 IFT.
Well, we've just got acquainted with an offspring of PowerVR and SÒMicroelectronics which provoked keen interest of Hercules Company. This company made a brave move having launched a Kyro II based graphics card named 3D Prophet 4500. Most probably, Hercules will release the whole set of Kyro and Kyro II based graphics cards. We expect to see cards with a TV-Out and DVI interface.
The shift from 0.25micron to 0.18micron manufacturing technology allowed the developers to increase the clock frequency, but all Kyro's weak points were nevertheless inherited in full by Kyro II.
Kyro II differs favorably from low-end and mainstream NVIDIA chips thanks to its beautiful performance in games with a not very big number of polygons involved. However in the newest games developed for DirectX7 and up, that is for graphics cards with hardware T&L unit, Kyro II is most likely to fail.
Sad but true: Kyro II is fairly considered a little bit outdated. That is why it's likely to be welcomed only by the fans of older games such as Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Quake3 and the games based on these engines. Of course, if you are a tile architecture admirer, are fond of some exotic products and dislike NVIDIA, you'll find Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 a good choice for relatively small money. Besides, Kyro/Kyro II driver developers tried to foresee nearly everything to make Kyro and Kyro II work properly with those applications and games, which are not specially designed for tile based accelerators. Most people, however, strongly associate "NVIDIA" with "high quality and performance" and hence do not regard Kyro II as a worthy competitor to NVIDIA stuff.
We believe that the best way to raise Kyro II's rating would be to announce graphics cards by Hercules with 32MB graphics memory. This shouldn't tell too negatively on the performance of Kyro II graphics cards, but is sure to make them still cheaper: these cards will be bundled with low-cost SDRAM chips with 5ns access time. PowerColor may decide to launch a Kyro II graphics card too, but considering NVIDIA's pressure upon other manufacturers we wouldn't claim that it will really happen.
As a final word, we would like to remind you of the highs and lows of Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 and Kyro II:
Highs:
Lows: