Kyro 2 the killer of nvidia ???

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Well I certainly didn't mean that all DX8 game using normal hardwired DX7 hw T&L wouldn't work on the Geforce or Radeon just because the games were using DX8, so if thats what you thought I meant when you originally replied to me then you did misunderstand my post (as I said maybe I should have been clearer about it when I said DX8 HW T&L, a clearer thing to say would have been programable HW T&L but then the only DX8 specific HW T&L is programable), but of course no hard feelings.
 
...someone has pointed out to me that Microsoft will not allow porting XBOX games to the PC platform...
Click to expand...
I'm not sure I believe this but I would not be surprised. Microsoft wants to protect its investment in the Xbox.

I hope it is not true.

We shall see.
 
Well thats your opinion but I don't agree with it entirely myself, I beleive that the aquanox benchmark shows that without programable HW T&L cards are forced to use SW T&L, the quote from Toms really doesn't disprove anything I said, he's basically saying that the Geforce 3 also has hardwired T&L built in so it can use this with games that don't use Vertex Shaders (as in games out now, or games out in the next year before games with vertex shaders really start to come out), I don't think games will have vertex shaders and also a hardwired T&L version, maybe at first but not for too long, eventually with all new cards supporting programable T&L games will move on just like they did when hardwired T&L came along, the difference being that CPU's are programable, they can use vertex shaders while the hardwired HW T&L units can't, companies won't keep releasing games that work with HW T&L but don't have all the effects for very long, especially with increasingly more powerful CPU's being made. Maybe my comment about hardwired T&L being useless when games with vertex shaders come along was a bit over the top and extreme, but certainly the hardwired T&L in Geforce and Radeon cards will not be included in games for long.

No games can really not work on a non HW T&L card, if anyone was stupid enough to make a game that didn't allow SW T&L then a simple driver trick like geometry assist could be added and the CPU could use the games HW T&L engine and it would probably be faster then using a SW T&L engine, anyway to me it makes allot more sense to allow for sw T&L even if your game runs slowly because by the time these games come out people will have far faster CPU's, I'm sure in a year CPU's will be just as fast (if not faster) then the Geforce 2 HW T&L unit, also this is all forgetting that at any decent resolution HW T&L goes out of the window, look at any benchmark and you'll see that a HW T&L card will beat a SW T&L card at 640x480 or 800x600 when neither card is fillrate or mem bandwidth limited, but who plays at those resolution?, once the game goes to 1024x768 the benchmarks level out, go any higher and its the card with the highest fillrate and memory bandwidth (or most efficient fillrate and memory bandwidth) thats going to come out on top and in these cases the HW T&L unit can actually slow the card down by using up precious bandwidth, or use FSAA and again the HW T&L card won't nesassarily win in a HW T&L optimised game unless it has the highest or most efficient fillrate and mem bandwidth.

As for DX8 hw T&L not only being programable, as you said hardwired T&L is a DX7 feature, it can be used in DX8 games but its not a DX8 specific feature, programable HW T&L is the DX8 version, somebody said that the Kyro II would be usless when games started using DX8 features because its stuck with DX7 features and my point is that every card but the Geforce 3 is stuck with DX7 features, so the Kyro II is no different when it comes to DX8 features.

<<<<<<It also seems to fit in to the overall time frame. One year from now means 6 months for ports from the DX8 Xbox to appear. (These games will obviously be written without a software T&L mode and I doubt developers will add one for the PC.)>>>>>>>

The X-Box will be using vertex shaders too, and you think that in 1 year from now X-box game ported over to the PC won't add SW T&L support but will add hardwired T&L support?, I doubt it, with all new cards comming out with vertex shaders hardwired T&L will be fazed out for the simple reason that is is hardwired, at least CPU's are programable and as they get faster they can always be used for things like vertex shaders, thats something that can't be said for hardwired HW T&L.
 
Teasy, do you think the eventual evolution of gaming graphics will mean that video cards will have a GPU, a CPU and all of system memory? Wouldn't this eliminate many of the inherent bottlenecks in the architecture of a conventional a motherboard with CPU with main memory and video card, on an AGP port, with it's own memory.
 
I think that "tom's" review was very very positive to the side of kyro
I did use the altavista ...
I don't understand german

😉
But I wonder why there is still only a review in german?
maybe Nvidia is doing something !!!
😉

also there is a new review in anandtech of the new geforce's 2 mx:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1453

but they also used kyro 2 in their tests...
what a pittifull attempt of nvidia to stay competetive against kyro II lol
 
The Kyro wont do very well, because its spelled wrong and the Egyptians have put a curse on it.


<font color=blue><b>Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?</b></font color=blue>
 
Go here Nvidia is trying to kill it's competition at birth...

Nvidia doesn´t have fair play they want to rip off our money ... with 600 US $ cards !!!
http://213.219.40.69/12040110.htm

thanks prrev
😉
don't compare nvidia to a ancient GOD
😉
lol
 
U Americans r being ripped off! The Asus Card based on the GeForce is £370 in England. Haha!

I'll never buy the Kyro 2. Maybe if I were broke and need a card now but will have enough money to get a better card a couplo month later. But, Otherwise I'm staying away from the Kyro. B4 you say I hate STM or Imagination, I'll tell you I had a Matrox m3D. that was based on the power vr.



<font color=blue><b>Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?</b></font color=blue>
 
No I don't think that will ever happen, because really what you've described there is basically a console, and we all know the strong points and weak points of consoles and PC's, on one side you have the console which is all connected much tigher together and runs much faster because of it and all games written for it work flawlessly, but when its too slow the whole thing is thrown away for a new system, no upgrading, then you have the PC were you can do anything, its much more flexible, if you think your graphics card isn't enough for you then you can buy a new graphics card, if your CPU isn't enough for you then you can buy a new CPU, if its still not fast enough then open the case pop on some extra cooling and overclock everything until it is fast enough, on the other hand there sometimes very annoying with there incompatibilities and troubles but people will always want both consoles and PC's, I think we'll simply see faster and faster buses between the motherboard and graphics card, AGPx8 for instance, but with programable HW T&L I suppose its almost as if they are moving a CPU onto the graphics card.
 
I've seen all the reviews. I've heard from both sides, and thats what mde me decide against the Kyro II.


<font color=blue><b>Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?</b></font color=blue>
 
well...
my bateries are recharging now...

after I went here:
http://www.fm/7-sphere/
😉
 
It depends what you are looking for. If are after Pure Power of Graphics, than your best bet is Geforce Card. Here you have to take everything into consideration that you want to have. Geforce cards can only supply you that at present.

If you are looking for perfomance/price ratio and Geforce 2 MX does not satisfy you, then Kyro 2 will do good.
 
<<<<<<<It depends what you are looking for. If are after Pure Power of Graphics, than your best bet is Geforce Card. Here you have to take everything into consideration that you want to have. Geforce cards can only supply you that at present.

If you are looking for perfomance/price ratio and Geforce 2 MX does not satisfy you, then Kyro 2 will do good.>>>>>>>

I'd say the Kyro II is a direct competitor to the Geforce 2 GTS (appart from it being much cheaper), its performance where it matters (high res/colour depth and FSAA) is ahead of the Geforce 2 GTS. And its got so much to offer in the future, so many people obsess about the hardwired HW T&L in the Geforce and Radeon cards and forget that not every developer wants to shove more and more poly's into there game when they can do so much more with more texture layers, Dot3, EMBM, higher res textures etc, yes just about every game coming out soon will support HW T&L but that doesn't mean they've put anymore poly's in there games, it only means they'll support the use of a HW T&L unit to transform and light there games (I'm sure some will go the high poly route though), an example of what I'm talking about is Serious Sam, thats a game that hasn't looked at massive poly counts but instead its looked at more texture layers (the game uses 3 texture layers all the time and sometimes 4) and making there game look more real by making more complex environments like loads of mountains outside with buildings all over the place and inside rooms full of collums and all sorts of stuff like real buildings are, how many times do you walk into a building and see an empty building like most games are full of?, not often so why are so many games full of these empty rooms? because the game designers care to much about lowering the level of overdraw which is created by frankly stupid graphics card which render everything and then decide what should actually have been rendered afterward......isn't that so bumb?, I mean come on, next time I go to the shops I think I'll follow suite, I'll buy something and then I'll count my money to see if I can actually afford what I'm buying😱), Serious Sam runs like a dream on the Kyro 1 and II, look at the Anand benchmarks, only the Geforce 3 can best the Kyro II in Serious Sam, with FSAA enabled at 1024x768x32 the Geforce 2 Ultra is left with a bloody nose as the Kyro II still pulls off a playable 30fps, the Kyro II beats every other card appart from the Geforce 3 at all resolutions in Serious Sam (except maybe 640x480 but then who plays that res?), thats the advantage of not having to draw anything thats not going to be seen and also the advantage of being able to put out 8 texture layers in one pass (the Geforce 2 GTS can only do 2 layers in 1 pass), oh and also the advantage of a cleverer method of FSAA, so there is more to the future of games then HW T&L, I know its hard to get out of this HW T&L obsesion, Nvidia have people thinking that HW T&L is everything, its really NOT, in its current form its something that helps performance when the card is not fillrate or memory bandwidth limited just like a faster CPU does, but when a card is mem bandwidth limited how much can a HW T&L or a faster CPU do?, when games are using 5-6 texture layers and massive textures and the GTS is on its knees because its having to pass every pixel to the frambuffer 3 times and its image quality looks like crap because of all those extra passes causing colour problems what will that HW T&L be doing to help that?, it will be wasting the cards precious memory bandwidth by trsnforming geometry faster when the card iself is already memory bandwidth limited and can't make use of the faster transform speed, I'm by no means saying I dislike HW T&L, its something that needs to keep being implimented in graphics cards, but by the time HW T&L is being used that heavily even the Ultra will be a low end card in the peformance stakes because its actual fillrate and memory bandwidth won't be able to keep up with new games, I think over the next 2 years programable HW T&L will come in and people will embrace it, until then HW T&L is just another feature and not the be all and end all.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Teasy on 04/13/01 10:41 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
In QuakeIII, which is a two texture game, in the higher resolutions as in 1024x768x32 and above a 32 meg card most use compressed textures to prevent using the much slower AGP textures from the main memory. On the GF2 cards AGP bandwidth is about 4-5 times slower compared to the 128bit DDR ram on board causing a significant slowdown if AGP textures are used. So if there is a 8 texture game (lets say 4 times the textures of QuakeIII) how much memory in the graphic card would you need? In other words, is the KyroII with 64mbit be sufficient for a 8 texture game without using the slower AGP memory? Do you think there will be 8 texture games coming out before hardware T&L games only?

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 04/13/01 10:57 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
Well considering S3TC uses a 6:1 ratio (DXT1 does anyway others use a lower ratio) then if a game used 8 layers of textures (4 times the number of texture layers in Q3) and they were larger textures then Q3 (which inevitably they would be) then a 32mb traditional board like the GTS would very likely be left using AGP texuring all the time even with S3TC enabled, the Kyro II again has an advantage here because it can use that 32mb ram to hold more textures then the GTS, it has more of that 32mb of ram to hold those textures because it doesn't need a big z-buffer, and in FSAA mode the advantage grows even further because the Kyro II also doesn't need a big frambuffer, at 640x480 with 4xFSAA all the Kyro II needs is a normal 640x480x32 framebuffer and no z-buffer, that leaves so much more space for textures then the GTS which would need a 1280x960x32 framebuffer and a 1280x960x32 z-buffer.

Well Serious Sam already uses 4 texture layers in some areas and 3 layers eveywhere else, Doom3 will use upto 8 texture layers, probably 6-7 in most area's with 8 in some area's.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Teasy on 04/13/01 11:16 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
Will there be a pci version of the KyroII? That is if you know. I am very impressed with the FSAA performance as indicated by many reviews, seems like a flight simulator user dream come true. Plus how much does the Z-Buffer take in Ram? I know in the Radeon it is compressed and doesn't take up as much space.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 04/13/01 11:24 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
Yeah it is, the problem is there are so many people who just don't understand how impressive it is, once people open there eyes to the powervr architucture and read up on it it'll astound everyone with how much better it is then the methods other cards currently use, the architecture is supperior in almost every way, think of any feature you can do on a traditional and a tiler can do just about all of them more efficiently, in the past its superiority was overshadowed by incompatability, its complicated to get something like this right especially when your not using a monster budget to do it, but after so many years IMGTEC have gotten it right finally, that happended with the Kyro 1, it was the first tile based renderer that had the compatability of a traditional card, now the Kyro II adds more raw power to that design, also another thing I didn't hit on when talking about multiple texture layers and the GTS having to use multiple passes to the framebuffer when more then 2 texture layers is used is that when this happens the poly the card is working on has to be reloaded to the card for every pass to the framebuffer and I think in some cases retransformed (not sure about the retransformed bit though), so if a GTS is using 4 passes for each pixel in a 8 texture layer game how will its HW T&L unit cope with retransforming some of the polys 4 times?, how will the AGP bus cope with reuploading every poly 4 times?, the AGP bandwidth used by that will be huge, while the Kyro II even with 8 layers will only need to upload the polys once, and the Kyro II isn't even limited to 8 layers in a single pass, the only reason its 8 layers is because thats the maximum allowed by DX8, if more were allowed the Kyro II could do it?, fancy 10 texture layers in a game?, what about 12?, 16?, the Kyro II could do those all in a single pass, while the GTS is using 8 passes, obviously this is all theoretical stuff but its worth thinking about.

Oh I was supposed to ask about Linux drivers wasn't I?, I forgot, doh!!!, I'll ask around and if I don't find out by Monday I'll have a word with IMGTEC's PR manager and see what he has to say on linux drivers.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<Will there be a pci version of the KyroII? That is if you know. I am very impressed with the FSAA performance as indicated by many reviews, seems like a flight simulator user dream come true. Plus how much does the Z-Buffer take in Ram? I know in the Radeon it is compressed and doesn't take up as much space.>>>>>>>

I'm not sure at this stage if there will be a PCI version, despite Nvidia's best efforts I have it on good athority that there are quite a few companies ready to produce Kyro II boards so its very possible there could be a PCI version, I've only just recently heard that its likely there will be a Kyro II with a TV-Tuner although I'm not sure who will produce this board yet, there was an entry found in a Kyro II driver for a popular TV-Tuner chip commonly used in ATI cards so it looks like a TV-Tuner version of the Kyro II is a destinct possibility. On your other question there is absolutely no z-buffer in ram, the Z-buffer is inside the Kyro II chip itself, also everything is rendered inside the Kyro II chip and only sent out to ram when totally finished and ready to send to the screen, this is how it has such fast FSAA, instead of having to render something at 4 times the size into ram and then sample it down in ram the Kyro II renderes it in tiles inside the chip and also samples it down inside the chip, so downsampling is allot faster and also the frambuffer in ram only has to be as big as the output image after its been downsampled, hence at 800x600 with 4xFSAA you only need a standard 800x600 framebuffer in ram with the Kyro II.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Teasy on 04/13/01 11:55 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
I am still waiting for more 3 texture games to come out. I don't know about >8 texture games, by then I would probably have 3 more computers built. If the hit on GTS would be very servere then I doubt very much that many game developers would develope high number texture games in the near future. Reason, because the GTS is one of the most popular game chipset out. Why make games that craw on what most people have? Well as you probably know I want a linux capable card somewhat modern in design for a second computer. Also thinking about a second card (pci) for my Radeon 64 computer for a dual monitor setup. There are many aspects I consider in a video card besides 3d game play such as 2D, Video capabilities, operating system support and stability. I almost didn't buy a Radeon due to ATIs reputation on drivers and previous experience with the Rage 128 but after playing around with a GF2 I was really turned off by the GF2 2d quality, game play was great on it though. Now I am considering in buying a GF2 card for different reasons: Great <b>Linux Support</b> and much lower prices now. Would love to own a KyroII just for flight simulator stuff but that is not sufficient in itself. As for price, I can get a GF2 MSI card for $132 or a Leadtech GF2 pro (32meg) 5.5ns ram for $155 delivered to my doorstep. A 64meg GF2 pro card with 5ns ram can also be had for $189 also. Those prices will continue to go down, so KyroII will have alot of competition in its price range. Radeons with 32mb of DDR ram can be had for less than $80. As far as I am concern the MX is virtually dead except for Twin View. I am worried that the KyroII will be priced to high for it to sell well. If the KyroII sells for less than $100 then it would probably sell better than most other cards until the prices drop further on its competition. There is one point that can be made: <b>Tile Base Rendering just went mainstream</b> :smile: .
 
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