Kyro II review

Have any of you guys read the Kyro II review at Anandtech.com? It seems to be a fairly kick ass card! And the price... Only $150! If I had a decent computer I would buy this card for sure.

do u mean the kyro storm 2>???! do you know that amd just released its 1.2 gig 266 manboard

I just mean the Kyro II.

It\'s built on PowerVR technology, just like the chip in Dreamcast. It\'s actually quite fast and got 100 fps in Q3 in 1024x768x32. It beat Geforce 2 GTS and even Ultra in some of the tests. For the price it\'s awesome.

Saw it and plan on getting it for my new system

[nO-One]

Yes Tile based rendering really saves bandwith.If they would just add a T&L unit this card would be able to become a REAL competitor to nVidia and ATi.
And 3Dfx was working on their own bandwith saving technique,HSR (hidden surface removal) and ATi has their HyperZ technoligy.nVidia is the only company with out any technique to save bandwith,and that is the biggest bottleneck with their cards.
They bought all of 3Dfx\'s core technoligy,they should be able to incorporate their HSR technique into their cards.Why they won\'t do it is beyond me.

Whell, actually, nO-One, nVidia\'s GeForce 3 incorporates a number bandwidth saving techniques similar to the ones used by its lower powered conterparts. These include Hidden Surface Occlusion, LossLess ZBuffer Compression (zero quality loss), Vertex Data Compresioin Techniques and of course, the age old thing we\'ve come to know as Texture Compression.

Now nVidia\'s aquisition of 3dfx\'s core technology came as the GeForce3\'s hardware specs were just being finalised to make way for work on its drivers. It\'ll be some time before we\'ll be seeing any of those aquired 3dfx technologies adapted for us in a nVidia chip. Hopefully, "some time" will turn out to be no longer than 18 months.

Regardless, nVidia has had success in enabling features in their devices, that were never in the original design specifications. I venture a guess the next major Detonator Driver release will incorporate a form of HSR and other performance enhaning improvements.

[nO-One]

Well I haven\'t had time to check out the complete GF.3 specs just glanced over them,thanks for the info
And nVidia has clearly stated that we won\'t see any of 3Dfx\'s technoligy until the next gen cards (GF.4) they were too far along in the development of the GF.3 that they couldn\'t include any of their newly aqquiered technoligy.
Hopefully the next gen cards will include sweet stuff that 3Dfx was working on.

The Kyro II boosts 64 megs of RAM, tile based rendering, ST3C texture compression, 8-layer multi-texturing, full screen anti-aliasing (without as big a performance hit as Geforce 2), EMBM and Dot3 bump mapping. The only thing it lacks is hardware T&L, but it\'ll probably come with the next version. But it isn\'t a huge drawback these days and for the price it\'s friggin\' great - $150! It sure beats the crap out of Geforce 2 MX and even GTS/Ultra sometimes.

[nO-One]

Don\'t get overly excited.It\'s a good card but it\'s a mid level card.It\'s designed to be and it will be.And the manufactorer is not very known etc..
I sure as hell hope this thing will make it though

Originally posted by nO-One
Don\'t get overly excited.It\'s a good card but it\'s a mid level card.It\'s designed to be and it will be.And the manufactorer is not very known etc..
I sure as hell hope this thing will make it though

I know it\'s not the "be all, end all" card. But for the price it sure sounds great. Especially compared to the Geforce 2 MX. Mid-range graphics cards have never been this good.

You can\'t beat that price and that\'s Sammy\'s point.

$150 for a card that will whip a $300 ATI Raedon ass.  But I wouldn\'t buy ATI anyway.