The Power of the Kyro II

The Hercules 3D Prophet 4500, priced at a meager $150 is originally targeted at the casual gamers, which directly competes with Nvidia's GeForce 2 MX and ATI Radeon 32 DDR budget cards. The Kyro II just crushes both of its competitors, and even more surprisingly, it even comes close to beating the GeForce 2 Ultra, priced no less than $250 (a slight step below their GeForce 3 speed demon). At its price and performance, the Kyro II is an incredible bargain.

One of the key features of the Kyro II is its uniqueness in rendering the 3D graphics. Unlike other videocards that use hardware based Texture and Lighting, the Kyro II uses a much more efficient technology called Tile Based Rendering. This type of rendering is a 3-D processing technique designed to limit the calculated amount of nonvisible pixels. The technique streamlines the amount of information traveling through the memory pipeline, enabling the card to process changes on-screen faster than its competitors. Although many critics believe that the Kyro II takes a major step back without the inclusion of the traditional Texture and Lighting, it is actually a step forward in the advancement of 3D. In theory, the traditional rendering method wastes a lot of memory on textures and pixels that aren't even visible on screen, which is shown in this nifty little chart below (click on the images to enlarge):

The Kyro II on the other hand, takes a totally different approach in which the images are broken into tiles that are rendered independently. This hidden surface removal is all done directly on the chip, which results in less time wasted accessing external memory. The only disadvantage of this is that it requires a lot of processing power. It is recommended that one would have at least a Pentium 3 600Mhz or an Athlon based system to take full advantage of the Kyro II. Basically, anything better than a Pentium II or a K6-2 is sufficient. Notice on the chart below that the Kyro II performs the depth tests before it starts with the rendering, making the whole process much more efficient.

Like the other big videocards in the market, the Kyro II includes Full Screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA), which renders graphics at higher resolutions. The Kyro II even has Environmental Bump Mapping (which none of the GeForce 2 cards have) that creates a sort of realism of texturing on 3D surfaces. For example, it could make a tank look more realistically metallic by giving it much more high quality textures.

Comparing the Kyro II with the GeForce3, GeForce2 MX on the same machine with an AMD 1Ghz Athlon and 256MB RAM, we received some amazing results. Our first test was on Quake 3, on OpenGL mode with all the graphical options maxed out.

And on Serious Sam, again with all the graphical options maxed out, the Kyro II just annihilates the GeForce 2 MX, breezes past the GeFOrce 2 GTS, and is good enough to compete with the $400 GeForce 3 card.

Although not as fast the GeForce 2 Ultra or the GeForce 3 because of its lower clock speed and heavy reliance on the main CPU and the system bus, its price and performance is an incredible buy for the budget gamer. It's even powerful enough to satisfy the hardcore gamer! This card definitely wins the TNL Best Buy Award!

Rating: A

· · · Raziel