by Ilya Gavrichenkov
03/17/2002 | 08:15 PM
With a half-year delay in the schedule, Power VR Technologies has announced the release of its new Kyro II SE graphics chip.
The new chip is based on PowerVR Series3 tile architecture, just like Kyro/Kyro II, but it has neither T&L hardware support, nor vertex and pixel shaders. The only difference between Kyro II SE and Kyro II is a higher clock frequency of Kyro II SE, which is 200 MHz, while Kyro II works at 175 MHz.<%BANNER[article]%>
It is sad to say that the new Power VR chip doesn’t have many chances to influence profoundly the arrangement of forces on the games videocards market. NVIDIA and ATI have gone much ahead in this race of arms. Nonetheless, Kyro II based videocards can favorably position themselves among other inexpensive videocards, due to a regular Kyro/Kyro II drivers update. For example, Power VR is announcing new Kyro II SE drivers release with a new EnT&L technology - an optimized T&L emulation software.
Finally, I would say that Hercules and Videologic companies have announced Kyro II SE based videocards. New Videologic Vivid!XS Elite and Hercules 3D Prophet 4800 boards will have 64 Mb SDRAM video-memory and a graphic chip, both working at a 200 MHz frequency. Among additional particularities are: TV-out and AGP 4x support (Kyro II based boards could only work in AGP 1x/2x modes).