Which Kyro?

[scott411]

Ordered a prophet 4500 last nite and realized this a.m. it's not compatible with DDR. Canceled order...looking for a stop-gap card that will run well on DDR memory. Any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

I don't understand, what do you mean its not compatible with DDR? It certainly does work with DDR motherboards. Or if you mean it doesn't come with DDR video ram then don't worry about it, DDR doesn't always mean better performance, its very deceptive and if you base your buying decisions of which card have DDR ram then you might very well make the wrong choice. For instance you can buy a Geforce MX with DDR ram but that board uses only a 64bit bus unlike the other MX boards that use 128bit buses and SDR ram so the DDR MX actually ends up a bit slower then the other MX SDR boards. Kyro II doesn't need DDR ram, it is not limited at all by its ram, its the only graphics card available that isn't limited by its ram (the Geforce 2 GTS has DDR and yet its totally limited by its ram and the same can be said for the Geforce 3 or the Radeon). The Kyro II uses something a whole lot more effective then DDR ram. It uses tile based rendering which effectively makes ram 3 times as efficient as the same ram on a normal board (DDR only makes ram just under twice as efficient). A Geforce 2 GTS has DDR ram but the Kyro II with its SDR ram has more memory bandwidth then the GTS because of tile based rendering and so Kyro II and Geforce 2 GTS are around the same speed (Kyro II is faster at high res with 32bit and also faster with FSAA).

If you want to see how well Kyro II does against other vid cards (including DDR boards like the Geforce 2 GTS and Radeon) take a look here: http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/kyro2/<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Teasy on 09/10/01 10:39 PM.</EM></FONT></P>