Your sort of posts are exactly what makes good threads fall appart into post after post of flames, an example of some of your posts:
<<<<<I thought the Kyro II was supposed to do multitexturing and FSAA without any performance penalty. I C it was all bullshit.
Another great review of the Kyro in fast graphics! lol! it was in the bottom half of the cards the whole time! Even in the scaling. I thought it was supposed to be more scalable than the GeForce Cards! Ha!>>>>>
I get so irratated at people like you who have nothing to say and just say things like LOL and HA all the time and can't post a civil logical post if there lives depended on it. The Kyro II was never supposed to have free FSAA, where did you get that idea? What it does have is a more efficient method of FSAA. It uses the same actual implementation as Geforce or Radeon (OGSS) but its tile based rendering makes the process more efficient by not needing as much fillrate to downsample the scene and also not needing an oversizes frame or z buffer in ram.
<<<<<The bottomline is the Kyro 2 is a crap card. They've been failing from the beginning. The Kyro was a crap card. The neon was a super crap card. the pcx2 was crap and the pcx2 was again super crap.
It never managed to do anything against the competition of the same generation. No body calls the tnt2 a gaming card. a lot of the computers with the tnt cards go to big businesses. If you work then you will know, you do work on those computers. you don't play games on those.
If you bought a Geforce GTS instead of the Kyro, you wouldn't need to upgrade again. If you get the Kyro 2, you'll probably want to upgrade again straight away. you'll probably be better off with a ati rage 3d charger or something.
You try to show how good the kyro is by linking into the middle of reviews only to the bits that show the kyro 2 to be favourable. But most of us read the whole thing and find the kyro to be crap.
You were claiming the kyro 2 has no perfomance hits with fsaa or multitexturing, but it does. look at the reviews you posted your self like this one here.>>>>>
Ok so now I know your problem, you don't like Powervr2 (the person not the product). If this is the case then please do not bring the Kyro II into your posts just to try to annoy powervr2. I assume this is whats happening here because the statements you make here are frankly astonishingly ignorant to the point of being funny. I assume you are not stupid so you must be saying all this to piss powervr2 off. The Kyro II is not by any stretch of the imagination "crap" and as for yout comment about it being better to buy a rage3d well this was actually the comment that made me realise that you don't actually beleive what your saying (if you did you'd be crazy) you just don't like powervr2.
I have already explained in good detail about multi-texturing and I also explained about the FSAA technique (I think?) in ealier posts but if you'd like me to explain them again then just ask. But please stop making rediculess comments about the Kyro II.
Just one more example:
<<<<<<So it is all coming out. The Kyro loses performance when you turn on FSAA. Also slows down with multitexturing just like other cards. but it also has problems with dx8. lol!
so basically it is a tnt class card with tile based rendering that scores low to medium frame rates. lol!>>>>>
Again ludicrous comments and again full of unnecessary LOL's. Unless your a mad scientist all those LOL's really should be kept to a minimum.
Holygrenade:
<<<<<Lets see some benchmarks with the kyro showing valid competition against the high end nVidia cards (Gf2 Pro + Ultra, GF3? yeah right!!!) before you start making these claims.>>>>>
I wouldn't say the Kyro II is competition for these cards. But it certainly becomes a competitor at high res and high colour depth. If you want proof of that look at the Anandtech review, and there are others that show this. Lots of the reviews show the Kyro II without forcing TC (which gives it a 30-40% framerate boost at high res with trilinear filtering enabled), so there not really representative of what you'd get if you bought a Kyro II. I force TC with every game on my Kyro 1 and have had only 3 games with problems with forcing TC out of about 50-60 that I've played on the card and 1 of those games problems is now fixed. So forcing TC is something that should be done for benchmarks.
<<<<<<From a technology point of view, the kyro tries to deny the graphics in games from evolving.>>>>>>
Would you like to explain that one to me then?, its traditionals like the Geforce which stop graphics in games from evolving by limiting game design to pethetic narrow corridors and bare rooms because its too stupid to know what its rendering before it renders it.
<<<<<9 - 12 months... 'quite a while'? In my book that is a short period to have a graphics card. I've had my GeForce DDR since its launch. Now that is 'quite a while'.>>>>>
And how much did you pay for that Geforce DDR?....for the price of a Kyro II 12 months is a long time.
Noko:
<<<<<So some of my questions would be if ever a TBR video card will have good drivers with few problems.>>>>>
Were are the major problems with the drivers? I haven't seen many problems. The drivers are very stable and largely problem free. On your point about it being slower on a slower system this is again allot to do with the DX8 bug. In a game like Giants I lose 15fps with DX8 installed when advanced water effects and shadows are enabled. With DX7 installed I lose no speed. This shows that those features are using rendering into textures and DX8 is wrongly using the CPU to perform the calculations when the Kyro II can render into textures in HW. MS have admited its there fault and they'll fix it.
<<<<<<I am almost concluding unless you have a 1ghz system or greater then another video card especially with T&L would probably be better.>>>>>>
Yeah if your willing to play games as 800x600x16 then by all means get a MX, but its HW T&L unit will do nothing for its crippled mem bandwidth at higher res and colour depth.
Also all this about the MX being half the price of a Kyro II just isn't true. I keep mentioning this point but nobody seems to listen. The Kyro II 32mb is £85 here in the U.K. Now don't try to tell me that a 32mb Kyro II will sell in the U.S for more then it sells in the U.K because thats impossible, VAT see's to that. The Kyro II 32mb will be no more then $90 in the U.S. If you want to compare Kyro II prices against other cards in the U.S right now then compare the Herc 4500 against other 64mb cards like MX400. Then you can assume that with half the amount of ram both cards will keep the same price ratio against each other.
Also people seem to assume the Herc 4500 will sell online at reccomended price, this is not going to happen. If there not selling for $120 in some places a short time after release then I'll eat my own crap
OzzieBloke:
<<<<<The tile-based rendering of the Kyro is an important step forward in the right direction, I believe. If someone can properly implement full tile rendering, properly, combine it with a programmable vertex shader and T&L unit, put some on-board cache on the damn thing, THEN you will have a card worth singing the praises of. Whether this will be a future Kyro or Radeon or GeForce is to be seen.
Kyro II only misses HW T&L from your wish list and that is added in the next PowerVR card and thats a promise.
<<<<<Edit: Add to that, enough rendering pipelines such as the Kyro has done, and better methods to deal with overdraw so that coders don't have to fart around like a wombat on golden syrup trying to get games to run respectably.>>>>>
Have I misunderstood you here or do you think that the Kyro II doesn't get rid of 100% of overdraw?
Warden:
<<<<<<If you read his statement that you quoted, while remembering that he considers "over 9 - 12 months" to be "quite a while," then it puts a different light on things. I have said from the beginning that the Kyro II should do fine, for about the next year or so, but I consider that to be a short time between upgrades, not "quite a while." I want a card to last two years if I can get it to, and that has been my complaint all along: I don't think the Kyro II (or the GF2 MX or the Voodoo 5) will be good for more than a year. The GF2 GTS and above won't run games with all the DX8 effects, but I think they will still be perfectly usable.>>>>>>>
No card you buy right now is going to last 2 years because of DX8 titles. IMO the best thing to do it buy a Kyro II now for a very cheap price (in 2 weeks when its out anyway) and then you can save money and have your pick of DX8 cards in 12 months.