PowerVR Kyro Series: Better than it really should be

View Vlask's video on the PowerVR PCX2 here: • Rare Graphics Cards - ...
Special thanks to Fouquin for lending his voice and a picture of his Kyro 2 PCI for this project.
In this video we take a look at Imagination Technologies' final desktop graphics card on the desktop PC market with the PowerVR Kyro and Kyro 2.
Platform specs:
Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton) @ 2.1GHz
512MB PC3200 @ 333MHz
Shuttle AK35GT2/R (VIA KT333)
Aureal Vortex 2
Western Digital WD800 80GB HDD
Windows 98SE Unofficial SP3
The cards:
Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT 32MB (115MHz core/memory)
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB (175MHz core/memory)
Radeon VE 32MB DDR (166MHz core; 333MHz memory)
Radeon 32MB SDR (166MHz core/memory)
Radeon 64MB DDR (183MHz core; 366MHz memory)
Radeon 7500 64MB (290MHz core; 460MHz memory)
GeForce2 MX200 32MB (175MHz core; 166MHz memory)
GeForce2 MX400 64MB (200MHz core; 175MHz memory)
GeForce2 GTS 32MB (200MHz core; 333MHz memory)
GeForce2 Ti 64MB (simulated) (250MHz core; 400MHz memory)
Voodoo5 5500 64MB (166MHz core/memory)
Drivers:
PowerVR Kyro Series - Driver v2.01
ATI Radeon Series - Catalyst 4.1
NVIDIA GeForce Series - Forceware 45.23
Purchase a Digital Foundry Retro T-shirt: teespring.com/digital-foundry...
Intro Animation By Ken Gruca Jr - Inquire at [e-mail]!
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[@ruxandy]

9:14 "GeForce 2 MX, later renamed MX 200" - this is false, the MX is almost as fast as an MX400, while the MX 200 is much slower, with lower frequencies and a 64 bit memory bus.

[@smiththers2]

yea, i had a GF2 MX and i dont remember it being a steaming pile of dog shit

[@PixelPipes]

Yeah someone else also pointed this out. Apologies for the inaccuracy.

[@ruxandy]

@@PixelPipes Not a problem, I still enjoyed the video. :-) Keep it up!

[@Halon1234]

There was also an MX 100 available for the Asian market with 32-bit access to memory. It was the definition of awful, sometimes losing to a TNT2 Vanta, and the U.S. market balked at it.

[@Raptor3388]

Yeah a bit like the vanilla GeForce3 compared to the later Ti200 and Ti500, even if we're in a different category.

[@mix3k818]

Imagine if there were more than 2 consumer grade GPU companies today

[@ItsRawdraft2]

Well, Matrox exists

[@blakegriplingph]

@@ItsRawdraft2 Albeit as a niche firm specialising in enterprise solutions like those multi-monitor setups for stores, offices and whatnot. Not to mention that they now just use off-the-shelf AMD GPUs instead of an in-house processor.

[@koodeus6170]

AMD, Nvidia, and Intel

[@MrKillswitch88]

S3 still exists though not for the normal consumer market.

[@mix3k818]

@@koodeus6170 Intel is not in the market yet and by then we'll be sitting between RDNA 2 vs Ampere and RDNA 3 vs [whatever is Nvidia naming it next]

[@Soonjai]

As someone who had the misfortune of having a GeForce 2 MX 200 in his first PC I love the verbal bashing of that card in this video. I am however shocked to learn that I probably would have enjoyed that System much more if I had invested in upgrading to a Kyro Card.

[@AmrikSadhra]

Glad to see some ImgTec content! Forever proud to work at PowerVR.

[@crystalfunky]

Strange, when I bought the card back then, I always had a feeling that the company had a great work ethic.

[@zxcvb_bvcxz]

What about the Poulsobo though?

[@krazyolie]

@@crystalfunky Was fine when I worked there - suspect it still is.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

For the love of god and all that is holy PLEASE get someone to increase 2D acceleration performance.

[@RaimarLunardi]

T&L was only an issue for me when GTASA was launched for PC on 2005, lol Until then I used a TNT2, was enough for games at 640x480 on my 15" CRT :D good times.

[@nelizmastr]

@Lassi Kinnunen sounds like RTX, lol.

[@ruxandy]

Actually, T&L helps even in Quake 2 (well, only the "T", not the "L"). However, framerate is already so high that you don't really notice it.

[@ErikZarth]

I remember those days. I was upgrading almost every 6 months. Going from a TNT2 to a TI4200 was quite a jump though.

[@si4632]

voodoo 3 over tnt2 anyday lol

[@MazdaChris]

I remember upgrading from a PIII 667 with a VooDoo 3, to an Athlon 1400 with the Kyro 4500 AGP and the difference for me was absolutely mind blowing. Suddenly I could play just about anything I wanted in silky smooth framerates a 1024x768. I've had a ton of gaming systems over the years, but this one was probably the one I loved the most.

[@PixelPipes]

Ha that's awesome

[@nooboard]

I got my first wow moment with my Matrox Mystique 220 (playing Descruction Derby 2 and Mech Warrior 2 bundled with that card) and the second wow with my Voodoo 1. Next was a Riva 128, TNT2 Vanta and no wow there. Then I got the Kyro 2 and that was my last wow moment in PC gaming history. The following cards where only faster than the cards I had before. If I remember them correctly it where Radeon 9600 Pro and Nvidia 3 TI 200. Then Nvidia 5900XT and 7800GT. But I don't even remember them in detail.

[@steve2dot0]

Great stuff - brought back memories of sitting in the lab, hour after hour doing hardware bring up on these little beasts and the variants that never made it to production. While the team behind PowerVR was tiny by comparison it was made up of an exceptional group of engineers.

[@PixelPipes]

It would have been great to see you guys stick it out for future iterations, but at least what we got was still pretty awesome. :)

[@lazibayer]

Lucky enough to snatch a Kyro2 back in the days.

[@laumpolumpio]

PowerVR not only developed the Dreamcast GPU, they also developed the Naomi 2 gpu which added an extra T&L geometry coprocessor feature which at the time, trumped the PS2 emotion engine and it was up to par to the Xbox Geforce 2.5-based gpu even surpassing it in some areas.

[@desertfish74]

PowerVr was also in Sega’s Dreamcast and Naomi arcade systems. It was glorious at the time.

[@F2bnp]

Thanks so much for the shoutout to that video on the PCX2. Me and Vlaskcz used to collaborate on these, I helped out where I could with tech history, translation and voice overs. Really glad to see that people enjoy these videos as much as they did, a lot of effort was put into them by both parties :).

[@PixelPipes]

The effort shows! I still go back and watch them repeatedly!

[@piecaruso97]

Thank you for still making those excellent videos

[@SainLanParty]

A very interesting series, they cannot be missing from any collector's shelf!

[@VdWck]

Great video! Love this time period. Even though the soundtrack used sounds much older than the time these cards were released haha

[@Ithirahad]

IDK, I seem to remember that kind of funky expository music thrown into informational videodocuments up through 2007 or so...

[@achaycock]

This was a very interesting video. I have recently re-acquired both the Kyro and Kyro II, having had the former card briefly back in 2000 - 2001. With the newest drivers, I found the card to be wonderful with a fantastic image quality. I did rediscover why I originally sent the card back and exchanged for a Geforce 2 MX. Earlier drivers, such as those available when I bought the card, were awful. Many games experienced serious artifacting issues. It is possible that there were drivers available then that may have solved this, but I did not have access to the internet at that time. In reality, that is what killed Kyro for most people that I knew. They gained a poor reputation that would not have been inflicted upon them had the cards shipped with better drivers.

[@samuelclark149]

The promise of this tech blew my mind at the time. It’s unfortunate it never quite delivered. Wish I could get my hands on one again.

[@joeyvdm1]

Awesome! Thanks for the video Nathan, really enjoyed it! Still have a Kyro 2 here as well, and it was a very interesting architecture. It is a shame that we never got to see the next GPUs they has planed, I would have absolutely picked one up just to see what the little company would have achieved. Anyways, thanks again for the upload Nathan, another tremendous episode as per usual, and it is most appreciated.

[@TimTaylor99]

As I remember a lot of people were like, ok they did it right with the Kyro I and gave a nice improvement with Kyro II, nice job! Kyro III will be mine, I mean it's 50% cheaper than it's challengers! Power VR: ....

[@ulfspringer8639]

Nathan, excellent review and video. Had a Kyro II back in the day and can fully confirm your findings. Being a student back then - for me it was the appeal to buy a budget card that in a lot of games and scenario's gave the much more expensive cards from ATI and Nvidia a run for it's money. Excellent time. Miss being a student... Keep up the good work and I am sure success (more subscribers & view) will come. Fingers crossed.

[@sgtjarhead99]

Love the Kyro. I bought the 32mb Hercules Prophet back in the early 2000s for an old PIII600 that I set up for my son. It was fine for his age appropriate games, but I tested a few other (modern for the time) games like Serious Sam and Unreal Tournament on it. Ran awesome for what I paid for it (below $60). Used it in that old box until it finally started developing graphical issues. A real shame it never got anywhere. Thought there were a lot of potential.

[@theenhancer]

How dare you seduce me with synthwave, I am weak.

[@ashleyjwilliamshand]

Top notch Content, Quality and Production Value. Scripting something like this must be daunting...and you make it look effortless. Great job as always.

[@FullyBuffered]

Fantastic work man! I am in awe of your production quality 💪🏻 Also an interesting story - I knew very little about these cards beforehand.

[@darrkstarg]

I picked up the kyro 2 when it came out. It was a great card for it's time.

[@bojanrakonjac6267]

A really great and professionally prepared video, it was worth waiting for next video, the quality is really top notch. I wish your view count increases exponentially to the quality you’re giving to the viewers 😊

[@Erebus-PCFX]

You should test the SiS 6236 and the SiS 315. The SiS 315 especially is often an underrated gem for retro gaming.

[@DanielCardei]

Excellent video! That beat sync its perfect :D

[@Da40kOrks]

I remember selling a few of these when I worked at a local shop in 2000-2002. They were always the cheapest thing on the shelf and never had anyone complain about the performance.

[@ErikZarth]

Love the channel. Was always curious about PowerVR cards.

[@FritzOFN]

Fun how they made it great in mobile market, a place that suites the tile based rendering perfect...I did read some time back that they are considering getting back to the PC market again...Can't wait for more competition on the graphics market again.

[@Ithirahad]

I'd love to see some decent budget offerings again. It seems ever since the 750Ti, "budget" gaming GPUs have been inexorably creeping (faster than inflation) into the lower enthusiast range.

[@RetroGPUsandBuilds]

Great video Nathan, love the editing and music 😊 but most of all verry good info on these cards 👍

[@8wal_zu19]

Oh heck yes, more old tech tests and stuff, please.

[@2beJT]

Power VR had me dazzled in Dreamcast!

[@vrenthusiast71]

It is nice to see videos being made on this classic old hardware. I actually happen to have a PowerVR PCX2 based Matrox m3D in my collection along with a VooDoo 1 Diamond Monster 3D. It would be nice to see a head to head of those two cards. Have it show how the PCX2 trails behind with slower CPUs yet scales up to closely match the VooDoo 1 when enough CPU power is thrown at it. I also have other notable classic cards like the VooDoo 2, VooDoo Banshee, Rendition v2100, ATI Rage Pro Turbo, S3 Savage 4 and various Nvidia cards. I also had some Cirrus Logic D3D compatible card, a Rendition v1000, and even a S3 Savage 2000 back when they were new. Sadly I didn't hold on to those last 3 cards knowing I would be a collector when I got older. Ohh Nostalgia... Anyway... Keep up the good work on the videos!

[@PixelPipes]

A comparison of those cards would be nice but a PCX2 is hard to come by (affordably).

[@aaldrich1982]

Love your videos, thanks for this.

[@totty2524]

Man, I'm glad I found this excellent channel!

[@bleeb1347]

I remember when reviews came out, the Kyro II got better frame rates than the Geforce 2 Ultra in a few titles like Serious Sam and Max Payne. I had both cards at the same time, and I worked at a mom and pop computer shop at the time to earn money by building and troubleshooting computers..

[@blastfromthepast3073]

Kyro killed the whole competition in GTA III ! Kyro I and II was the best bang for buck... so nobody cares about Nvidia back in the days. For Retro Gaming its better to use a AGP 3.3V Mainboard. Kyro is coded for AGP 1.5V but could die really soon. Good Work Nathan!

[@ruckus7554]

The PowerVR lives on in the Apple and Android phones. It is also used in multiple smart TV brands.

[@pascalmariany]

Awesome and in dept video! Thanks! Nice you also included the Voodoo 5! 👏🏼

[@2007tantrum]

Nvidia feared about PowerVR.... didn’t want another competitor after taking out 3Dfx... interesting project Nathan)) well done

[@djdoo]

Very nice presentation and review of those very underrated cards! I used to have a 3D Prophet 4500 back in the day and it had a very nice feature a TV-out port and was really fun! The card came bundled with PowerDVD 3.0 and it was the first time we watched DVD video as a family when I hooked the PC on the living room TV via composite signal! The image quality was so good compared to analog TV broadcasts and VHS that I will never forget it... The tv-out could give you Composite and S-Video signals where most of the competition gave only Composite if any. As far as gaming performance concerned I used the card only with Win 2000 and Win XP OSes and I was really impressed, never had glitches and weird things, especially performance was a lot better with the final drivers 2 version that had that EnTnL feature at the settings. too bad they didn't release drivers for Vista and Linux never opensourced their blob. The card is in use even today in an offline Win XP PC for office use with an Athlon 64 cpu on it.

[@registrazioniduemillaotton6030]

Excellent Video! Thanks!

[@TSOMprojects]

Keep up the good work and these quality videos!

[@classic_jam]

I've been waiting for this

[@marek4265]

Great video. I had the Kyro II at that time in my pc and as I remember it was great. I still remember the surface textures in half-life looked better than on any other graphic cards my friends had at that time. This brings back memories. :)

[@ccleorina]

Ahhh i remember buying Hercules Prophet 4500... good old days playing Sam2 and Diablo 2... Great vid btw... good job...

[@Thohean]

I never knew about this card, but started my adventures in PC hardware with the Radeon 9200 as my first aftermarket card purchase, with having nVidia stuff in the prebuilt PCs up to that point. The audio quality shift from your on camera presence to the voice over section is rather distracting. Personally, for my audio playback setup, I prefer the "on camera" audio, as it's less boomy. I love these tech history videos about companies/products I never knew about. Thank you for making them.

[@MrJasonodonnell]

I worked in AV at the time and I brought A Prophet 4000XT because of the Image Quality, I vaguely remember Blues and Blacks standing out.

[@praystation]

i love power vr. i was shocked it wasnt able to compete and finally lost out. power vr is so efficient that it only renders what you could see.

[@jayyanz]

In Australia, you could purchase an 64mb Apollo branded Kyro II AGP for $175 AUD (or less). This was the same price point as the GeForce MX 400s at the time. The Hercules branded card was prices closer to the GeForce 2 GTS/Tis, making it a bad option (and I probably why it didnt sell well). But the significantly cheaper Apollo model made it a great choice vs a GeForce 2 MX. The internal 32bit rendering was also a great feature back then, as many earlier cards (and even the GF2 MX line) struggled with 32 bit. You could set all your game settings to 32bit and knowing you wouldn't lose any performance. It also had a noticeable uplift in image quality for 16bit titles that didn't support 32bit rendering.

[@retractingblinds]

Tremendous video. There's a lot history to The Kyro cards, tile based rendering is something PowerVR continued to do well down the line on their mobile chips, and may have given Nvidia a sneaky idea or two - despite Nvidia's dismissal for their Maxwell chips. Incredible how such an old idea ended up being so decisive in a future technology competition.

[@mesterak]

Very educational thank you!

[@CPUGalaxy]

Great video! very interesting. Love to watch your very professional made content. 👍🏻

[@PixelPipes]

Thank you for the kind words!

[@stellated]

It's cool that tile based rendering which was once a performance optimization now lives on as a power optimization in many phones and tablets.

[@segaRPGfan]

I came across a Kyro II in an old PC I bought and had to do some research as I had never heard of it. I also just had to give it a go out of curiosity. I'm incredibly impressed with its performance! Running in a 440bx mobo with a P3 1ghz it shines. It often outperforms a Geforce 4 4200 ti in the same system! I think its efficiency helps overcome the bottlenecks in my system whereas the GF4 isn't able to reach its full potential.

[@nicolaskong2461]

Thank you so much for the video. God, I miss those days, tinkering PCs, swapping parts over weekends just to push for that 5 extra fps... GeForce 2 DDR, the hated card everyone wanted but no one can afford, at least that was the case for me.. once again, thank you.

[@smughlesmcphucer6667]

Great video, thank you 👍

[@gamecomparisons]

I enjoyed this video, thank you. Kyro and m3D were the only 3D accellerators I could afford back in the days when I started building my own PCs. I'll never understand the mentality of needing 100+FPS as long as 30 or 60FPS are consistent, especially if the card costs as much as my entire system build.

[@poison7512]

Get a high refresh rate monitor and try it. That's what youre missing.

[@Pillokun]

Ah, my wasted youth is coming back to me, almost make my eyes tear up.. Love this content, and the music fits so well as well. Thumbs up.

[@stevec00ps]

Reading those specs of the Kyro sounds like you're reading the specs of the Matrox G400 with the 32 bit colour and EMBM :) I finally recently got a Matrox M3D to add to the collection too!

[@anomaly95]

Interesting that PowerVR eventually went the same direction as ARM. They currently just license their graphics cores to whomever wants to use them.

[@anasevi9456]

brilliant, thank yuo so much because Kyro doesn't get the love it deserved. The wall was too tall for newbs even then... XGI, and a mildly resurgent S3graphics would prove this again in the following years. Will be extremely interesting to see how Intel's entry fares; given they've got mountains of dosh to chuck that PowerVR didn't at their entry.

[@BladeRunner21577]

I had an AGP version of the 4000 at the time, it was an upgrade from a Rage XL that came bundled with a motherboard I bought. Great cards for the money they were.

[@TheSynrgy1987]

I have fond memories of my 32MB Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT Kyro 1 PCI card, It was an improvement over at the time my onboard intel i810 graphics( * PTSD flashbacks * ) I was a poor student so couldn't afford the big cards. In fact i still have the card but it no longer works :( RIP 4000XT.

[@PixelPipes]

Treasure it! Maybe it can be revived someday!

[@franzflasch8181]

I owned a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 back then because I could not effort a better card, still I was absolutely satisfied with its performance.

[@BillAE91]

I got a Kyro II some years ago to use on my Windows 98 PC out of curiosity. Very interesting card with good compatibility. I don't recall any problems with the games I played. It also supports Environmental Bump Mapping which is visible in some games. My geforce 2 Mx back in the day did not.

[@hooby3D]

Very interesting! Would love to see similar coverage of S3 based cards

[@aquaristiksteffen7712]

Super Vid - exept 4 the volume jumps :D

[@roger.monitor]

What really stand out is the Voodoo5 !

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

I had a powervr card in 97 ish. i like the fact that even though it was an addon card it used switching and not the patch lead like the 3dfx

[@sunnohh]

Your content is fantastic

[@jorgvespermann5364]

Back in the Day I was quite happy with my Kyro-II. It was a pretty good Card back in the Day and I never had Problems with the Card with Windows XP my Games worked pretty well

[@BadManiac]

Love my Kyros! I have the Powercolor Evil Kyro 32MB AGP card and the gorgeous blue Hercules 3DProphet 4500XT 64MB Kyro II. Shame they get very little use since there's always better options when building a retro PC these days. I tried the Kyro II in my 2001 build but my Radeon 8500 simply runs rings around it.

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

I remember these well back in the day, and I also remember the intel i740 and the apocalypse 5D

[@tHeWasTeDYouTh]

I am still depressed today because the Kyro III never came out....damn you ST Micro!!! It is a huge loss to all of us gamers like the death of 3dfx. we almost got the Spectre 3000 card which was literally as powerful as a Geforce 4 but it was coming out in early 2001 and would have destroyed the geforce 3(this is done because you had two spectre cards side by side like the geforce 5 5500)

[@theobserver4214]

The GeForce 3 had full DirectX8 support, so unless the Spectre 3000 was also able to support it, it would have fallen to the same trap the VooDoo 5500 did.

[@ghanz84]

You meant the Voodoo 5500...

[@WarrenChurulich]

One or my old favorite cards too!

[@OneCosmic749]

I had the Radeon 7500 in my PC back in 2001/2002 with a Celeron Tualatin 1.2GHz OC to 1.5GHz daily on air and 1.68GHz on peltier. I had a PowerVR GPU in my Samsung Galaxy S - the 1st gen :) It was kind of a small lower perf GPU but PowerVR was also very popular in earlier Apple iPads/iPhones/iPods, the later ones had much beefier GPUs than my S.

[@nooboard]

20:10 I might not be the first who mentioned it but PowerVR was integrated into Intel SoCs which where also available on ITX Desktop Mainboards for example on the ASRock AD2550-ITX. 😀

[@turrican4d599]

I had the PCX2 additional to my Voodoo2 cars out of curiousity. I loved the included demos, especially the real time shadows in Extreme Racing. Same goes for TNT1 and TNT2Ultra. I just wanted them to check out for myself. Needless to say, that the TNT2Ultra was awesome in Q3Arena demo compared to my Voodoo3 2000@3500

[@hardwarechronicles9178]

it was also in the Sega dreamcast wich had made a custom PowerVR chip for the console

[@carbonsx3]

2:34 😉

[@TheBig451]

Yeah he literally says that in the video.

[@hardwarechronicles9178]

@@carbonsx3 i see that now but i typed the comment even before i saw the part when he mentioned it :) but thnx for letting me know

[@Chasnah]

3dfx was originally designing a chip for the Dreamcast until they broke NDA and SEGA terminated their contract. An absolute shame. *CORRECTION* The deal fell apart not because of 3dfx breaking any contracts, but because yet again Sega of Japan fucked over Sega of America by vetoing the PowerPC 603 / 3dfx GPU Blackbelt design and instead using their own Hitachi SH-4 / PowerVR based system.

[@Malheirods]

@@Chasnah And they were right. It was much better than the BlackBelt project. Both more capable and cheaper.

[@ElysaraCh]

I still have my Hercules 3D Prophet 4500.

[@desktopstu4145]

I still have a PowerVR Kyro2 PCI 32mb card. Its sat in a Pentium 3 rig that gets fired up from time, running windows 2000.

[@PixelPipes]

Wow! Kyro 2s on PCI are extremely rare!

[@cyphaborg6598]

Even back in the 90's I can't remember seeing this brand, The voodoo boxes were pretty dominant over here.

[@reignmans]

just checked and holy moly i still have the 3d prophet 4500

[@Vermilicious]

New to me. Neat to know.

[@hamisch]

lol, I had a Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT back then. It was my first Graphics Card upgrade ever.

[@anomaly95]

Everyone forgets this (because they weren't very popular), but Intel used PowerVR graphics for their first generation of Atom chipsets. The US15W chipset for the z5xx Atoms used GMA500 graphics.

[@Accostrophe]

hey pixelpipes, just wanted to say i love your videos! I wanted to ask if you plan on doing a card review/battle of the radeon 4870 vs the nvidia equivalent. The 4870 was my second flagship card and i wanted to know what you thought of it.

[@Ometecuhtli]

PowerVR was the card for me. 99 USD, no need to replace the existing 2D card, no bridging cables, the games I played. Unfortunately I couldn't find it in Mexico, I waited and saved some money and by the time Voodoo2 & Half-life were out so I bought into the 3dfx line until their end.

[@rekleif]

The first graphics card I loved was a Hercules ATi card. Great 2d with a voodoo card doing 3d. Have used ATi/AMD ever since. Tried Nvidia with the 7800 but it started to artifact in under a year....

[@TurboMMaster]

Instead of byuing STB, 3dfx should fuse with PowerVR - there was a lot of cool stuff in PowerVR chips that 3dfx could utilize in their flagship, high end cards. But again - propably everything would have been better than STB deal, and it's just my own, purely hypothetical optimal scenerio. It's nice to see though that some cards outside of "Great 4 (3Dfx, Nvidia, ATI and Matrox)" are getting more and more attention, even if they had to wait 20 years to do so.

[@TIPP_X]

I had a hercules kyro2 card back in the days

[@claudiodaloia3458]

Hello, in 2001 I was a kyro II user. Your performance in quake 3 are really slow. the kyro and kyro ii were very strong with that game. One simple trick to improve the kyro performance it's to use bilinear filtering istead of trilinear one. Love to see kyro again. good video!!!

[@PixelPipes]

Yep trilinear was on and kills performance on Kyro cards

[@alexanderwhite8320]

Lack of Hardware T&L is what caused me to upgrade from RIVA TNT2 M64 to GeForce2 MX400. I wanted to play Battlefield 1942 that required this feature. It was in early 2003 if I remember correctly. So T&L was important. Also the TNT2 had a hardware or driver flaw that randomly caused lockup when Diablo2 cinematics played.

[@RGD2k]

Great video. My experience of the Kyro2 was that you ran at 1280x1024@85Hz, sync locked to avoid wasting CPU time. (because that helped increase the *minimum* frame rate). On a fast cpu -- or even better, it turns out, on a 2-socket Xeon system;- It could run UT2003 (for which you needed to enable that 'EnTnL' option so the software would *let* you run it) -- dm_antalus **without dropping a frame**. Just perfectly smooth rendering at 85 fps. IIRC it took some driver hacking. Because of the tile-rendering, the frame rate would NOT drop, no matter how many characters etc there were - but you had to have enough CPU (preferably, a second one) to run the driver. So we come to the thing about the kyro2. Poor driver support is the only thing that killed it - most particularly, there was a linux driver, but only for linux 2.4. When 2.6 came out, with it's new direct-rendering-manager breaking support for the linux 2.4 graphics drivers, and Imagination didn't so much as release the old driver source so that it could be fixed. Well, at that point kyro finally died. Even when the driver worked, sometimes the card would seem to come up 'not quite right'. As in, it would render cleanly, but slowly. But then when you had everything properly squared away, it would run as smooth as glass. That 'not completely broken' failure mode seemed to be a problem with the cards. It was slightly worse under linux - more noticably terrible, or fantastic, just with a small change of driver setup. The point is that what you really wanted was smooth game performance. Although matchups like this quoting max fps are fun, and have become the standard, they really have nothing to do with how smooth the games run. What you really want to know is the statistics of how infrequently a screen refresh is missed. This equates to - does the frame rate *ever* drop below the sync refresh rate? and if so, how often? Performance where the card is never late for the monitor is perfect. And the kyro2 could actually do this. (with a dual-cpu setup at least! Talk about 'before its time'). This is why Apple chose them. Apple needed battery energy efficiency for its iPhone and iPad. It needed smooth looking performance - always. Engineers know that perception matters - and human perception vis-a-vis refresh rate time resolution is really quite easy for an engineer to measure. You can do it by blinking a dim LED with a microcontroller. Program a simple loop to turn the LED on, then wait a period of milliseconds (ms), then off and wait the same period, and then on again for the period a third time, then off. Play this while messing with that period, and at a certain setting, the two flashes will time-blur into just one blink. It'll go from being noticable as a super-fast double-blink, to looking like just one blink. This is just like a visual analogue resolution test where you see how many 'lines' you can resolve, looking through a lens. For me, that threshold is about 42ms - a nice, easy number to remember. This means if you exceed that, it *will* be noticable. If you stay under that, always, then it will appear 'smooth'. (More so if you do proper motion blur, because rendering the scene with fast-moving things 'sharp' makes them appear to be separate things at this threshold, whereas if blurred properly, like cinema does it, it looks right again. To do that properly needs really low latency gaze-tracking anway: What are you following on-screen with your eyes? Those should be sharp, everything else, blurred... but I digress). What you really want to do is get frame rendering time t_f, and calculate and plog the quantity 10*log_10(t_f/42ms). This is 'perceptual visual smoothness' in dB. A score 0 are bad, and pretty much will be perceived as linearly worse on that scale. Now go back, get yourself a 2-cpu xeon of the right vintage, and re-run all your benchmarks using logged frame rendering times with sync on at the highest Hz/resolution product your monitor can handle (but preferably at least 75Hz, because that happens to be able to drop one or even two frames without it being noticable, going by that critical 42ms time limit, but 60Hz can't afford to drop one), plotted up that way over time. Then sum up all the per-frame dB scores over time, and show the final relative scores that way. This gives a truely 'fair' score, which should be consistent with how smooth the games 'feel'. High synthetic FPS numbers that you can't actually ever see anyway just don't count. Those fast frames even if rendered without sync will just appear as narrow 'bands' across the screen, and they will be there so fast that they're unhelpful. This is long before freesync and g-sync 'fixed' that, and also why >200Hz displays actually make sense - when they have to be rendered with sync, what you're doing is allowing late frames that can still make it to screen within that critical 42 ms, without 'missing the bus' and having to wait a whole 'nother frame time. At 60Hz, be late just once, and now you'll be 50 ms late. At 75Hz, miss your frame and you can still be 'on time' at 40ms. At 200 Hz, you can afford to be up to 7 frames late, and it will still be imperceptable. You may find that the kyro2 could blow everything else out of the water - because the minimum frame rates (maximum frame rendering times ) hurt this score in line with how you perceive smoothness, and the Kyro2, (with sufficient CPU support) was smooth. Even back in the day, there seems to be 2 kinds of review of the card - those that saw that 'helpful warning' and ran it as a budget card, with a budget cpu (and a low-cache CPU such as a celeron or duron *really* hurt the driver) and those interested to see how well it could perform with the best CPU available, looking to see if the wildly different and more efficient architecture could have legs on it.... So the reviews were either, 'this stinks' or 'Wow!, This thing punches way above it's weight class !'. And sadly, it seemed that the former were more numerous and louder than the latter.

[@PixelPipes]

If I were to go back and redo this video, it would be cool to have 1% lows just so we can see more information on relative smoothness. Averages definitely don't tell the whole story. A quick note on the dual CPU idea. Windows 9x does not support more than one (logical or physical) CPU, and I found that the performance hit moving to an NT-based OS like XP was horrific on Kyro cards. The driver simply wasn't optimized.

[@ricardobarros1090]

Where I found the best driver for my Kyro 2 4500 64mb for windows 98?

[@ATomRileyA]

I had a Kyro II and it worked pretty well but remember it was a bit lacking after a while, but wish they were still around making desktop GPU's as we could do with more competition. Still have the card packed away.

[@angushades2jz]

Great video

[@mortrek]

I had an original kyro. I was a believer. It was by Powercolor though, and they underclocked the card from the reference design since they used inferior parts. If you used the reference drivers, the card would get about as far as booting before locking up. You had to either use the Powercolor drivers, or set up the reference drivers to underclock on boot. Still, the technology was great. I used it for a good couple years.

[@SpectrumTwist]

Definitely got to step in here and mention that those openGL results on the kyro cards look like they are halved their performance, which raises the question. As someone that owned the kyro II and frequenty ran comparisons with quake 3 and a few other opengl titles, there were a few drivers in which the kyro card had a openGL fault. Because even with the hardware at the time, i often posted results that put the openGL performance in those titles pretty much in line with the geforce 2 gts and occasionally within arms reach of the TI.

[@lflyr6287]

PixelPipes : I still own both Hercules 3D Prophet 4000 Kyro 1 32MB SDR AGP4x and and Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro 2 64MB SDR AGP4x....both still work and I have a plan of building an AGP rig....the only thing that those PowerVR chips didn't have built in on a hardware level was T&L aka Transformation & Lightning engine and that made them quicly slower than Voodoo, ATI and Geforce cards. But that "rendering only what's visible on the screen" aka tile based rendering made it unique for quite a while.