Kyro II? And what's T&L

[wiredspider]

I'm thinking of trading something for the Hercules Kyro II 64MB, read some reviews and it seems to bad at T&L. What the heck is T&L? If anyone has this card, have you been able to play jedi outcast II, GTA3, or America's Amry on there? If no one has it, should this card be able to handle those games fairly well? Thanks

 

[KingofFah]

Transform and Lighting, it is one of the many things for 3D acceleration. If you do a search you can find info on this.
What it does is take some of the load of the CPU and put it on the graphics card, so that the CPU can do other things that need to be done in the game you are running. I think that sums it up pretty well. If you have 136 $ to spend on a video card, then get the GeForce 4 ti4200
http://avlogic.com/product.cgi?code=11028833. It should be able to run those games a lot faster than the Kyro. If you do not have that much cash you could get an ATI 8500 or if you really do not have a lot get a GeForce 4 MX440. Check PriceWatch for prices on these cards. Hope this is some help to you.
The card I recommend you get is the GeForce Ti4400. It has more memory than the 4200 for those games you want to play, and you can always overclock the memory and clock speeds to past the 4600 speeds. The 4200 does have 128, but it comes a lot closer to the price range of the 4400, so that's why I suggest just getting a 4400 and overclocking it.

 

[BFG10K]

Transform and lighting relieves the processor of the repetitive tasks of performing transform (converting co-ordinates) and lighting calculations and instead has the GPU perform them. This leaves the processor to work on other tasks and speeds up performance and in some cases increases image quality too.

Forget about the Kyro2 as it's a completely obsolete card and it'll crawl in the vast majority of today's games. For just $99 you can pick up a much faster and better Radeon 8500LE and for ~$150 you can score an even faster Ti4200/Ti4400. If you buy a Kyro2 you'll likely be disappointed with its performance as soon as you install it.

I highly advise you to forget about this card and get something else instead.

 

[holdencommodore]

The Kyro 2 SE will be out really soon. I'm perfectly happy with my Kyro 2, I really like the 2D and 3D quality. For the price I got mine for (the price of a MX 200), I am more than happy with it, and I have no desire to change it at the moment. You need a fairly high end processor to bring the Kyro to it's best though. Speeds of a Kyro 2 are usually better than a MX400, and are on par with a GF2 GTS/Ultra.

Cheers

 

[rogue1979]

The stock speed of a GTS is 200/333, the Ultra is 250/460, that's a pretty big difference in performance. The Kyro is much closer to the GTS.

 

[holdencommodore]

Kyro II beats the GF2 Pro/Ultra in some High Detail tests in Anands GPU Shootout http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1647&p=8. On average, about GTS speeds can be had on Kyro II with a good CPU.

Cheers

 

[deadcell]

I just need a quick answer. Is there a PCI card that can handle hardware T&L. My friend has a mobo with integrated video and his only option is PCI, and he was reading that Star Wars Galaxies will require hardware T&L. He is not about to drop any money for a new mobo/cpu, cause then he would still need a new video card, but what card can he get that has hardware T&L.

 

[Sunner]

I agree with BFG, forget the Kyro.

If not for the lackluster speed, for it's featureset, it's extremely dated.

 

[nemesismk2]

IMO the Kyro2 has reached the end of the road, the Kyro2 SE has enhanced t&l which hardly works at all and it's performance is usually no better than the original Kyro2. Right now it only really works with a P4 cpu, when tested with anything AMD it's performance was better with it switched off.

I really wish they'd released the Kyro3 instead of the Kyro2SE which IMO isn't worth the £99 www.simply.co.uk are trying to sell it for, you can even get a GF4 MX460 for that price.

 

[wiredspider]

Thanks for all the information, I'm just trading something for the card(worth about $35-$40). Right now I have a Voodoo3 with only 16 MB of memory so I think I will be inpressed for a little while. I'm not a big gamer, just like to be able to play every now and then. If I don't trade for this card, then the only card I can get/afford is the Radeons on sale at compusa. I would think this card is better then those Radeons. Personally, I don't play games enough to justify spending more then $50 for my video card.

 

[Mingon]

IMO the Kyro2 has reached the end of the road, the Kyro2 SE has enhanced t&l which hardly works at all and it's performance is usually no better than the original Kyro2

:Q

 

[Boogak]

Originally posted by: deadcell
I just need a quick answer. Is there a PCI card that can handle hardware T&L. My friend has a mobo with integrated video and his only option is PCI, and he was reading that Star Wars Galaxies will require hardware T&L. He is not about to drop any money for a new mobo/cpu, cause then he would still need a new video card, but what card can he get that has hardware T&L.

I believe the GeForce2 MX series and GeForce4 MX series came in PCI flavors. But since Star Wars Galaxies hasn't even started beta yet and is a long time from release, I'd tell your friend to save his money and just get a new mobo/cpu/video card when it does come out. IIRC, Verant has stated that Galaxies will take advantage of the programmable features of the GeForce3 level cards and above, which the current MX series do not support.

 

[BFG10K]

the Kyro2 SE has enhanced t&l which hardly works at all and it's performance is usually no better than the original Kyro2

The "enhanced" T&L is just some SIMD optimisations in the drivers which might speed up the (software) processing of these functions a little bit, aka 3dfx's final drivers.

The Kyro3 is/was supposed to have a full hardware T&L unit.

Is there a PCI card that can handle hardware T&L.

Radeon, GF2 MX, GF4 MX although keep in mind that all of these cards will have crippled performance because PCI doesn't have the necessary bandwidth to cope with T&L vertex data.