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Mate, your posts are a breath of fresh air compared to some of the other stuff that gets posted in this place  Technically well thought out too... but, could you please put carriage returns between every two or three sentences?  Solid text is harder to read than I thought
 
Kyro II is certainly looking good... now if only it would consider putting in the extras that nVidia and Radeon are putting into their cards, and you would have a card NASA would go ga-ga over
 
Australian PMs are like steer horns; a point here, a point there, & a heap of bull in the middle.

I too enjoy your posts and Serious Sam sure flys on the KyroII. Indicating very good OpenGL drivers both in Win9x and W2k. I did some T&L test and will post latter today. It is very interesting and accurate and reflects future games. Just too tired now to go into the details. I think we concluded that the KyroII fill rates will not be limiting until 6-8 textures are being used in very high resolutions. Then again like Serious Sam the number of textures of an object can vary depending on the object requirements. Meaning that a game could use 8 textures on some objects and 3 on others which would mean the KyroII fillrates would indeed be sufficient virtually in any number of textures from 1 to 8 as long as the textures application is selective. Good night and we can pick up this discussion tomorrow, that is if you wish. Thanks.  
 
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 04/15/01 11:32 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

A new review on kyro !
<A HREF="http://www.acidhardware.com/reviews/3dprophet4500/index.shtml" target="_new">http://www.acidhardware.com/reviews/3dprophet4500/index.shtml</A>  
 
where is the tomshardware review IN ENGLISH ?????
 
hum even in a low test system kyro is doing great...
 
Test System
 
* Asus A7V
* AMD Duron 650MHz
* 256MHz PC-133 SDRAM
* Quantum LM ATA/66 15GB HDD
* SBLive! Value
* AOpen 53x CD-ROM
* Windows 2000 Professional
* 7.51 Hercules Kyro II Drivers
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by powervr2 on 04/15/01 12:45 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Nvidia drones???
 
Youre just jealous, cuz you cant afford a GeForce 3 and i can!
 
 
<font color=blue><b>Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?</b></font color=blue>

if you earn the money to buy a geforce 3 in a hard way (working 8 hours a day, many days)  
You wouldn't buy one even if you actually could afford it !!
 
if it's your's dad money try to think what it is to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week to buy a geforce 3 ...
 
you should start thinking that for the price of a geforce 3 you could buy 4 kyro II ... and what you could get NOW with geforce 3 is "playing" some nvidia demos...

3 Days work.
 
 
<font color=blue><b>Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?</b></font color=blue>

one rich boy !
here in portugal, we would have to work (in average) a full month to buy a geforce 3 and that is without eating paying the electricity bills etc...

for a kyro 2 one week should be enough (5 days )

If I remember correctly, games such as Quake3 have no previously compressed and specially processed textures in standard delivery. (Guess the GTS and Radeon do have this option.) As for the bad sky problem, 6.47 version of NVIDIA's Detonator fixed this problem. Currently, Nvidia has forced DXT5 in Quake III. The DXT5 unpacking algorithm gives the best graphics quality over the other 4 algorithms.)
 
=
<font color=green>Ran out of bullsh!t to feed to the flies.</font color=green>

Lets get some quotes out of the way:

The Game, <b>Max Payne</b>

This is one of the best game reviews I've ever read and I highly recommend anyone who is into actions games to buy this issue now.
 
The Engine is from Remedy Entertainment next door to MadOnion. 3dMark2001 game 3 uses the <i>Max Payne</i> engine in which you can benchmark your computer's graphical power. Plus you can use it as a test tool to see the affects of hardware T&L compared to software T&L in a modern future DX8 engine. A reflection of things to come in the gaming world. I will also be testing the affects of AGP2x versus AGP4x since the Kyro2 is only a AGP2x board and the large amount of polygon data may saturate 2x AGP speeds when doing software T&L.
 
<b>My gig:</b> <font color=blue>IWILL KK266 650@866 Thunderbird, Radeon 64 VIVO Retail, 512mb pc133 cas2 Crucial, Leadman PowMax 400w p/s, 20gb IBM drive, 12x DVD, Pacific Digital 4x/4x/24x burner, Linksys ethernet card and hub, 3Com cable modem, HP 20" Trinitron, Microsoft digital Sound sys 80 sound/speaker system, Microsoft optical mouse, Win2k/WinMe dual boot</font color=blue>
 
<b>TESTS:</b>(All tests conducted in W2k with ATIs official 3102 drivers, Radeon at stock 183/183 clocks, 3dMark2001.)
 
. . . <b>Game 3, MAX PAYNE</b>, AGP 4x
 
. . . . . <b>800x600x32</b> (HardWare T&L)/(Software T&L). . . . HWT&L/SWT&L
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> <b>68.2FPS</b>/53.1FPS . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 28% faster
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> <b>31.6FPS</b>/24.1FPS . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 31% faster
 
. . . . . <b>1024x768x32</b>
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> <b>58.2</b>/50.3 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 16% faster
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> <b>28.9</b>/23.8 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 21% faster
 
. . . . . <b>1152x864x32</b> (This is my normal gaming resolution)
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> <b>49.5</b>/46.2 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 7% faster
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> <b>25.4</b>/22.5 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 13% faster
. . . . . . . Note: This may not be my gaming resolution for this awesome game.
 
. . . . . <b>1280x1024x32</b>
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> 39.9/<b>41.4</b> . . . <b>SWT&L</b> finally surpasses HWT&L by 4%
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> <b>21.5</b>/20.3 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> by 6%
. . . . . . . Note: This is the transition point between HWT&L and SWT&L for my setup. Notice also
. . . . . . . that HWT&L when the details is higher still over takes SWT&L.
 
. . . . . <b>1600x1200x32</b>
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> 28.6/<b>30.9</b> . . . <b>SWT&L</b> is 7% faster
. . . . . . . <font color=blue><b>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> 15.7/<b>15.9</b> . . . <b>SWT&L</b> is 1% faster
. . . . . . . Note: Finally SWT&L takes the lead in both cases.
 
<b>Conclusion:</b> In the playable resolutions of this game T&L makes a significant performance increase but demishes quickly after 1023x768x32 but still significant at 1152x864x32 in obtaining better performance.
 
My next post will explore the effects of AGP4x and AGP2x on this high poly game test.
 
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 04/15/01 01:28 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

good work noko...
 
but kyro don't need even a agp bus... it would do just well on a pci ... because of the Tile base rendering there are less triangles need to feed the card, because of the "z-buffer" it will never get out of local memory even in higher depths, because of the 8-layer support it will be required to feed this card with the triangles only once in a 8 cycle time with 8 layer games...

yes T&L is a good feature that would help any card at lower depths...
kyro could do just fine without that T&L, but if he gets T&L (kyro 3 ) it will benefit kyro 3 in ALL depths ALL !!

Yeah your right I can't afford a geforce 3, oh and why do you assume I mean owners of Nvidia cards when I say Nvidia drones?, I've owned a TNT2 and a Geforce DDR and I don't consider myself an Nvidia drone, I was referring to people that just won't listen to anything thats not totally praising Nvidia, they just don't want to hear it unless your saying what they've been lead to beleive by King Nvidia, now you obviously consider yourself to be an Nvidia drone or you wouldn't have posted such a ill thought out post, after all for all you know I could have been a millionaire that could buy as many Geforce 3's as I wanted, even if I did buy a Geforce 3 why should that change my opinion of the technical aspects of any other graphics card?

Well when you are doing Software T&L then the AGP bus does come into play and it would affect the performance of not only the Kyro but any AGP optimized card. On the pci bus there will be contentions with everything else, USB, sound card, ethernet etc. AGP it is a much faster direct port to the cpu which doesn't have to wait in line for access. Now I redid the benchmarks above but used AGP 2x instead by reconfiguring my bios and confirming AGP was at 2x by using PowerStrip3.0 build 125 and Wcpuid Version 3.0 by H-Oda. Seeing if the slower AGP speed would affect software T&L. Well this is what I found:
 
<b>TESTS:</b>(All tests conducted in W2k with ATIs official 3102 drivers, Radeon at stock 183/183 clocks, 3dMark2001.)
 
. . . <b>Game 3, MAX PAYNE</b>, AGP 2x
 
. . . . . <b>1024x768x32</b>
. . . . . . . <b><font color=blue>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> <b>58.3</b>/50.8 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 15% faster
. . . . . . . <b><font color=blue>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> <b>28.8</b>/23.9 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 21% faster
 
. . . . . <b>1280x1024x32</b>
. . . . . . . <b><font color=blue>Low Detail:</b></font color=blue> 40.2/<b>41.2</b> . . . <b>SWT&L</b> is 2% faster
. . . . . . . <b><font color=blue>HighDetail:</b></font color=blue> <b>21.4</b>/20.4 . . . <b>HWT&L</b> is 5% faster
 
<b>Conclusion:</b>
There was no real significant difference in performance running in AGP 2x versus 4x. Appears that AGP 2x speeds are sufficient for this Game test and was not the bottleneck. At the middle to lower resolutions the CPU is limiting when doing SW T&L while at the higher resolutions the bandwidth of my video card became more limiting for HW T&L. I also conclude that the Kyro 2x AGP limitation will not adversely affect its performance in games (at least in Max Payne). <i>Actually a higher speed cpu could transfer more T&L information than my 864mhz cpu in which case the 2x AGP speed may become the bottleneck. I have no way in testing this to see if that would be the case or not.)</i>
 
Next series of tests I will degrade my CPU speed down reflective of a lower speed systems, something which the KyroII is targeted at, showing the T&L difference between the CPU and GPU.
 
 
 
 
 
 
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 04/15/01 06:40 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Nice work noko, actually the Kyro II is a AGPx4 chip, Hercules have limited there board to 2xAGP because some ALI mobo's apparently have instibility with the Kyro II in AGPx4 mode, personaly I think hercules should have left the choice of AGP modes to the user so that people without ALI mobo's could use AGPx4, as I said Hercules have limited there board to AGPx4 but this doesn't mean every board maker will choose to do this, the box for the Videologic Vivid!XS (Kyro II) has AGP x2/x4 written on it (I can give you the pic if you want) and the specs on there site say the same so it looks like there Kyro II board is AGPx4, the Kyro 1 board that I'm using right now is in AGPx4 mode and the Kyro II is simply a Kyro 1 on a 0.18 micron process and a slight redesign (the addition of 3 million transistors) to help with the higher clock speed.
 
I'll do some similar tests on my Kyro soon, could you do some FSAA benches in that game?, because I only have a 14" monitor so I can't go above 1024x768x32 in my benches.

Interesting.
 
I have a question.  (My ignorance is really going to show).  What is the relationship between FSB speed and AGP speed?  I understand that AGP 1X is normally 66 mhz.  2x and 4x are then obvious.  Here is where I am confused.  This implies the AGP 4x would theoretically be 4 x 66 mhz or 266.7 mhz (66 mhz is really 66.6666...).  How can AGP operate this fast if FSB is only 133 mhz?

Thanks for the update, it really doesn't appear that AGP 2x/4x makes that much of a difference. Since I don't have access to a Intel platform (noted better AGP) then obviously I can't be totally accurate. I Will do FSAA test as you requested also remember the Radeon is the worst card for performance hit in doing FSAA. Something which the KyroII shines at. I am pretty confident to say that the KyroII card besides the GF3 card would be the best card period for flight simulators due to its superior FSAA.  
 
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 04/15/01 03:39 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Actually the AGP bus stays at 66mhz and is is doubled pumped at 2x and quad pumped at 4x. Kinda like DDR ram. Max transfer rates are as follows 1x - 256mb/sec - 2x - 512mb/sec - 4x - 1024mb/sec directly to and from the cpu. Now the max transfer rate of the pci bus is 128mb/sec which is shared with IDE controller, usb, com ports, serial port, sound card, ethernet etc...

Thanks but now I am even more confused.
 
IF AGP is clocked at 66mhz and double-pumped, how is the effective data rate 256mb/sec?  (By the way, is that megabits or megabytes?)  
 
I still have a problem with my original question even though my facts may be in error.  If the FSB is clocked at 133 mhz and double pumped at 266 mhz, what is the maximum rate which data can effectively passed over the AGP bus.  It seems to me that FSB limits everything.  What is the <b>data rate</b> of the FSB relative to the AGP's data rate, I guess is the question I am really getting at?

I've read all the posts in here (I know, I have too much time on my hand) and I didn't think anyone here is totally obsessed with nVidia. The only person that was totally obsessed was powervr2, when he was claiming the kyroII is the king of the crop and the "killer of nvidia". He started to reason later.
 
You too were also making some claims like nVidia and ATI having no HSR, and the GF2 and Radeon T&L becoming redundant in Microsoft Direct X 8, until noko and holygranade said it wasnt true.
 
I dont blind my self from other peoples views however dim they may be. I dont think I am one of those so called drones. With these lables, you are becomming just as bad as AMDMeltdown and fugger.
 
You are right. You could have been a millionaire. But, I was making my assumptions from what I read here. You were not showing appreciation for technology but a obsessive passion for the cheaper option.
 
 
<font color=blue><b>Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?</b></font color=blue>