Kyro2 does it again.

[typedef]

Damn these Kyro2's! (thats what nVidia's sayint) hehe.

http://www.planettribes.com

"Being the resident tech guy here @ PlanetTribes, I pride myself with having the latest hardware in my hands. I recently received a review sample of the new Kyro II video card. What was the first thing I did? I popped it in the Win98SE testbed (1.1ghz Athlon TBird) and fired up Tribes 2. The results are phenominal! Out outperforms my GeForce 2 Pro by far. I managed to crank up T2 to 1280x1024x32 with EVERYTHING at full and did not see a dip below 45fps - in a nice 50-60 player game. My GF2 Pro can't hardly do that at 1024x768. I plan to write up something more detailed on it in a short while, I just wanted to inform you of what preliminary results I've pushed out of it. So far, it looks like a GREAT card."

 

[Angus]

so what's your point?

 

[bluemax]

only that a sub $150 card is outperforming a $400 nVidia monster perhaps?

I'm really sick of the crap nVidia's pulling. Their video cards are decent enough, but the PR bullpucky is downright SICKENING! :|

 

[typedef]

"so what's your point"

Yeah, that's an extremely well thought out, articulate opinion...Of course, what was I thinking?! I almost thought this was a forum for "Discussion about Video Products"...Damn.

As Tim Sweeney so kindly proclaimed..."TNT2 class chip"...Anyhow, I think the notion that this thing just might exceed an Ultra...Considering the fact I would be willing to bet he's got his Pro clocked in the same vicinity as an Ultra...and the GF3 doesn't exceed the Ultra until you get into the 1280/1600 territory...Well, this thing might just be *the* card to own if you're a tribes2 gamer.

 

[WhiteWonder]

when will these cards be out?

 

[rickn]

in about 2 weeks

 

[pidge]

Well, the Pro is not a $400 card anymore. It is a $200 card now.

 

[typedef]

As far as retail pricing is concerned, the Pro is not $200. I have personally seen it in my neck-of-the-woods for $299, and it was on sale. If you're going to compare it to absolute lowest PriceWatch-esque prices, then you cannot compare it to the $149 retail price of the Kyro2. Regardless, the Kyro2 is still a cheaper part, and you can bet that you will find it cheaper once these things go to distributers.

Coupled with a nice CPU (and a nice CPU these days come pretty damn cheap), the benchmarks that are out there sure paint a nice picture for IMG.

By the way, it's pretty clear that the $400 reference was in reference to the GeForce3...not the Pro.

 

[pidge]

I was not comparing it to Pricewatch. I was comparing it to Anand's article stating that the new pricepoint for the Geforce 2 Pro was going to be around $200 and that it was going to be a retail board instead of just an OEM board.

 

[nitrousninja]

<< I have personally seen it in my neck-of-the-woods for $299, and it was on sale >>

I hope you don't pay retail for everything you buy ;-) All the Pros canbe purchased for less than $200 shipped. I'm just curious as to how the Kryo2 performs in W2K. If it sucks it'll be worthless to me as I get great performance out of my Pro in W2K and I can run Tribes2 at 1600x1200 everything cranked with no trouble as well as every other game out there. Don't get me wrong I'm hoping the Kryo2 is a great card as we(consumers) stand to benefit from the competition.

 

[typedef]

There are numerous benchmarks on the Kyro2, and the Windows2000 scores are practically identical to the Win9x/ME scores...When I say practically, I MEAN practically. They're almost dead on. Maybe ATI can finally get their act together.

 

[richleader]

&quot;Maybe ATI can finally get their act together.&quot;

ATI?

 

[jpprod]

Very interesting. If Kyro II truly outperforms GeForce2 Pro that significantly in Tribes II, perhaps the reason why the game is told to be sluggish on so many systems is because the engine has loads of overdraw, not because of relatively heavy geometry. Kyro II might not be such a bad solution for high-poly games as I had assumed.

Another title in which I'd love to see performance comparisons between GeForce line and Kyro II is Operation Flashpoint (demo). It has huge amounts of overdraw combined with respectable polygon count, especially inside vehicles with higher level-of-detail settings.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Read through the boards, seems that the K2 wasn't really any faster at lower resolutions then it was at 1280x1024. Peaking around 100FPS(lower then the GF2) but not experiencing nearly as much slowdown in intense situations(compared to the GF2).

 

[BrainSalad]

I just hope it has excellent 2D as well. If it turns out to have sh*tty 2D like Nvidia, I'll keep my Matrox and say f*ck it to gaming for good!

 

[Daemon_UK]

<< Read through the boards, seems that the K2 wasn't really any faster at lower resolutions then it was at 1280x1024. Peaking around 100FPS(lower then the GF2) but not experiencing nearly as much slowdown in intense situations(compared to the GF2). >>



Ben, you left out the most inportant bit:

50 fps in 1024, not that much faster....
Max of about 100, lower than GF2 numbers but the min is ALOT higher than gf2 gts/pros

I think most gamers would agree that MAX fps means nothing. I could care less if a graphics card does 150fps, what matters is min fps!

 

[typedef]

Exactly...Who gives a crap if the max FPS jump up to 200 FPS, if the min FPS reach 20? All you want, as a gamer, is smooth performance. Hypothetically, if there was a card that could always deliver 60 FPS (always...never more, never less), you wouldn't care about not hitting 120 FPS!

Lets also not forget that the Kyro2 can actually enable texture compression without making your screen look like a nightmare...The GeForce S3TC implementation (even using DXT2/3) looks horrible as compared to the competition. I cannot believe they never addressed this with GF3.

 

[BlvdKing]

This is quite an accomplishment. The question is: are newer games like Tribes 2 going to have alot more overdraw? If so, this card (or the KYRO III) may be more future proof than some people think (Tim Sweeny comes to mind).

I am ordering some new parts soon and the KYRO II will be one of them if I don't see any fatal flaws.

 

[powervr2]

the guy on planet tribes also said:

&quot;Update: I'm starting to wonder if this card was forced by the drivers on 16 bit all the time, so I'm going to do a clean format of that machine and get back to you.&quot;

he don't believe on those results !!!

maybe he don't know that performance at 16 bits on kyro is the same at 32 bits...

well we are starting to see new T&amp;L games (serious sam,tribes 2,black and white) and they rock on kyro without T&amp;L
maybe T&amp;L is good but there are issues still more important !!!
if we increase the complexity we will increasy the overdraw !!!
maybe we will se a boost on future games with T&amp;L !!! lol

look at droneZ a pixel shader game that gets with a &quot;low&quot; p3 at 700 60 fps at 1024x768 at 32 bits on kyro 2...

IMHO the future is bright to kyro !!!

 

[Wrawrat]

The future of Kyro II is bright... as long as their drivers programmers are bright. They could produce a very great card (like ATI Radeon), but if the drivers don't unlock the true power of the card (or are questionnably unstable), well, good bye bright features. I'm sure that people want a card to play with as many games as possible, not only one or two games.

 

[jpprod]

Indeed, that sort of behaviour indicates there's a lot of overdraw in Tribes II, and that it's limiting the performance most of the time. However, Kyro II should suffer considerably bigger performance hit than GeForce2 Pro when there's lots of particle effects - such as explosions and smoke - on the screen because of it's relatively low pixel fillrate (350Mpixels/s vs. GF2's 800Mpixels/s). So worst-case performance leadership between these cards may vary depending on circumstances that actually produced the lowest framerates.

 

[TravisBickle]

jpprod are you talking about alpha blending? i was just thinking about Ben's comment on how the kyro is sustaining good frame rates better than the GF2 in intense situations. to me they usually mean lots of explosions, but maybe I just play too much QuakeIII

 

[richleader]

Well, asses with good video cards [read: nvidia] spam smoke grenades in CS already and the cheaper video cards can't handle it. Nothing new with the Kryo 2 there, then, but it beats the %$#%@ out of a Radeon Le.

 

[jpprod]

jpprod are you talking about alpha blending?

Yes. With transparent particles it is necessary to draw all of the occluding polygons. Tile-based architecture can reduce memory bandwidth requirements in this type of operations as multiple blends are only done into the fast tile buffer (before write to the frame buffer memory), but it does not help with actual fillrate requirements.

edit:

Well, asses with good video cards [read: nvidia] spam smoke grenades in CS already and the cheaper video cards can't handle it. Nothing new with the Kryo 2 there, then, but it beats the %$#%@ out of a Radeon Le.

Exactly. Situation is similar between Radeon and GeForce2. Number of texturing units per pipeline won't make any difference, and Radeon's texturing potential is left unused. Only pixel fillrate is required, and 166MHz Radeon's is even slightly lower than Kyro II's (333Mpixels/s vs. 350Mpixels/s).

 

[powervr2]

if we put more than 2/3 layers of textures , kyro get an advantage...
kyro does 8 layers in a single pass.
that means that kyro only needs to be feed of all the geometry on a given scene only one time on a given game with more than 3 layers of texture.

I have taken this from hercules website :

&quot;
8-layer Multi-texturing
3D Prophet 4500 supports up to 8 layers of different textures that can be combined together in order to obtain lifelike 3D environments, and more realistic details on backgrounds and surfaces.
How it works:
All the texture blending process is performed in a local tile buffer:
Gain in performance due to an increased CPU
Image quality increase due to internal texture blending instead of superposing different textures
&quot;

geforce 1/2 only supports 2 layers in a single pass with issues on the quality when used more than 3 layers...
I think that geforce 3 only supports 4 but I am not sure...

also because of the nature of the tile rendering alpha blending will be less of an issue...

because of the internal texture blending instead of superposing different textures kyro saves some cpu cycles on a heavy multitexturing game, and making all in one pass thus giving even more cycles to the cpu (like T&amp;L lol) and giving with that better quality...

but you are right to some extent (jpprod) those issues that you told were present on previous TBR based cards but not anymore. in fact kyro beneficts from using textures effects more than other do.


Please forgive me about my poor english...