It is worth mentioning, that when the Kyro II card was released it cost around 100$ less then the Geforce 2 GTS. The premise of the Kyro II was "the power of a GTS with the price of an MX".
This was a really nice comparison. But we must remember that the Kyro II release with a MRSP of 149 US dolars. At a time when the Geforce 2 GTS was priced at 230. So the Kyro II sit between the Geforce 2 GTS and the MX, ofering great performance for it's price. What is really ironic is that now nVidia uses a tile based renderer, much like the Kyro II.
I miss the old times where we had several GPU manufacturers so much... competition was awesome, cards had unique features, some were good for certain tasks and others for different things, etc. Today's 2 way battle between ati/amd and nvidia really sucks. The same happens with the cpu market, we need Cyrix!
PowerVR is alive and doing very well in a mobile/handheld GPU market, so in theory they can return to PC market, if they really really wanted. Although I doubt they want any of it, tbh. Too much to lose and it's not worth it, when they feel perfectly fine and cozy in their niche.
I had the Hercules version, it was a decent card for it's time and it was nice to see another company trying to compete. Shame PowerVR quit the consumer GPU market.
I had a Hurcules 3D Prophet 4500 back in the day, it was a Kyro 2 card - I remember going to the PC store where my friend worked and asked advice about a GPU upgrade and it came down to these 2 card's - He said (putting it in terms I could understand as I knew not much about PC's back then) the GeForce is more expensive & a more powerful card that renders everything including stuff that's not displayed, the Kyro 2 on the other hand is cheaper and less powerful but only renders what is displayed making it more efficient, so I saved some cash and went with the kyro 2 - never regretted it :-)
I remember back in 2001 I was weighing up between getting the GeForce 2MX or a Kyro II. Picked the Kyro II for my AMD Duron system and was very happy till I upgraded to a Athlon XP 2400+ and a GeForce4 Ti 4200. I viewed the Kyro II as a GeForce 2 1.5... halfway between an MX and GTS
Hey Phil! I had Kyro 1 back in the day, also paired with a 1GHz Athlon. One for the things I remember about that card was an option in the drivers to force textures to be compressed using S3TC or DXT1 I think. Anyway, because of the way the textures were compressed by the drivers on the fly, there was little to no performance penalty for using trilinear filtering as opposed to bilinear. Also, a few later programs would detect the software T&L option as being software, and would refuse to run IIRC. I think Spider-Man was one such game, and maybe No One Lives Forever. There was a program called 3D Analyze or Analyzer, something like that, that no only allowed you to trick the games into thinking you had T&L with just a checkbox, or even mask your card completely by entering a vender id into it. There were also options for setting max texture size and enabling / disabling pixel shaders. Obviously enabling them on a card like the Kyro series wouldn't actually allow them to use pixel shaders, but it would allow you to run games that checked for shaders and wouldn't boot without them. Often those games would still work well anyway, but lacked things like per pixel lighting or some bump mapping on objects.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The drivers have a ton of options that's for sure. Texture compression usually has nothing to do with speed, but improves the image quality as much larger textures can be used. But I could be wrong and it's something I don't think I'll get around to test at the moment as time is precious. Back in the day these little tweaks to get newer games, I see the appeal. But if you build something now, just get a newer GPU I would say.
texture compression doesn't usually have anything to do with speed. What I'm saying is that if you force texture compression in the drivers the it to will not have a performance penalty for enabling trilinear filtering when compared to bilinear. It's a quirk with the card.
Ok I get you now :) I looked into this further, and texture compression should give a speed advantage actually, as uncompressed will use more memory bandwidth. At least that's what I think is happening. Anyway, great tip!
You're an absolute legend. Not only do you try all this random crap your viewers ask, it must take AGES to do all this disk imaging and multiple consistent testing to get accurate results, all to make a 9 minute video. Are you in Brisbane? I'd love to buy you a drink!
Just to add. I remember when this card first came out. Everyone pretty much came to the same conclusions as in this video. However hardware TnL was the future at least as far as Nvidia would have you believe. Also, a rumored Kyro III was suppose to include a TnL engine later on. No idea if they ever got to the stage where their were prototypes, probably not. If they had gotten to that point Nvidia would have had a problem on their hands. I miss GPU companies that were coming up with disruptive features. Could you imagine if 3DFX had bought Kyro instead of STB, and then if AMD had bought 3DFX instead of ATI? Or even if 3dFX continued on it's own till the present. Wonder what kinda of world we would live in from a GPU perspective if that had happened.
@@philscomputerlab Nvidia is just a green Apple, and it would be fantastic to imagine what would be for today's 3D graphics if simple technologies such as tile rendering and Glide would have evolved instead of getting stagnated.
I had a 1 Ghz Athlon and Kyro II combo....I believe I had the Athlon overclocked as well.....I also won something from AMD. They sent me an Athlon T-shirt that I am literally wearing right now as I type this lol..... and the technical manuals for the Athlon.
The thing about openGL is that the developer specifies what is to be done but not explicitly how it is to be done. This allows for the driver to guess what the application is trying to do and pick the most efficient way for that. This means you can have game-specific optimizations that really matter; but that takes a lot of effort.
I upgraded my Voodoo Banshee to a Kyro II. Even though the number were supposed to be solid, I think I ended up returning it because it just didn't seem smooth at the time. It was a really interesting chip. Always wondered why I can a weird experience.
@@Stanwis I had the best AMD CPU at the time which as I recall was ahead of Intels best. But I felt it was all driver related. Maybe they got better but it was a really uneven experience.
I had a Radeon 8500 LE from Hercules (used with Athlon XP 2500@32000 and 2 GB of DDR RAM) that look t very much like the card in the video. Sold it later, abd bought GF 6600GT AGP. Still have Hercules sticker on my old case.
Loved my Kyro 2 back in the day. Cost the same as a GeForce 2 MX but had near GeForce 2 GTS performance. Tile-based rendering wasn’t just marketing hype and the card had a good picture quality. Also the kyros internal 32bit rendering meant that older titles that didn’t have 32bit rendering resolutions looked better
kyro II had great drivers, i mean compared to how inconsistant the drivers from nvidia and ati where back then, i would love to see them licence somebody a gpu design that was modern, they are very good cards when paired with a decent cpu, infact, with some titles, you could game at 1600x1200 with playable fps by simply turning off the cpu bound shadow effects.. (gpu shadows are the way to go...)
I remember that Quake 2 had a "PowerVR OpenGL" renderer aside from the standard OpenGL one. Does it make any differences for the Kyro II? Did you try it?
Interesting note about the PowerVR Kyro II for you, Phil - it's got killer CPU scaling and lots of untapped potential. Try testing it with something like an XP 2100+ (or faster) and you'll see the Kyro really start to pull away from the GeForce.
Really goes to show how NVIDIA's marketing machine destroyed the competition. I was a sucker for that machine. My last non-nvidia card at the time was the Voodoo3. I never even tried the PowerVR and ATI seemed like a second-class citizen. Now most of my retro machines use ATI Radeon 9xxx series. Really just luck of the draw and their DVI capability. Thanks for the review!
Rewatched it cause someone gave me for $0 the Hercules 3d Prophet 4500 cause he wasn't sure if it was working (same dude will also give me a Chaintech Geforce2 Ti 32mb). Luckily it's in perfect working condition! Haven't tested it yet properly except one game. In Max Payne with the geforce2 mx400 I got only 20fps on average. But with the Kyro II I'm now at 36fps!!
Well I once tested the 32 vs 64 MB version of the GeForce 2 and I saw a difference at very high resolutions and high settings, but not much and only at more extreme settings.
I never heard of the Kyro II before the interactive build. Now I want to find one. BTW does anyone know how much a monster 3D voodoo 2 cost at release?
is it my imagination or the game has some graphical glitchs? I see some horizontal lines appear, was that game with the colorful aliens recorded with the Kyro II or the GeForce 2?
I had a Kyro 2 Chip back in these days, think it was a Hercules Card. Problem were the drivers, not the speed at all. The PowerVR Team was much smaller then Nvidia and i think they had not enough capacities for writing good and stable drivers or maybe the games and applications were written Nvidia optimized. Later on the drivers got better and more stable but at the release they were horrible and nobody wanted to buy this chip because of that! Only freaks got a Kyro Chip but it was worth it. However, PowerVR had the IQ to compete with Nvidia and it would be cool to see them back in the ring!
Man, emulated TnL, I remember that. When WoW first came out I played it on a TNT2 with emulated TnL while I waited for my x850xt pe to ship. Other than all the terrain textures being rotated 90 degrees, it did surprisingly well at 25-30fps.
That's how it was back in the days. You just made due with what you have. Now going from a TNT2 to a X850 XT PE? DAMN, now that would have been a HUGE boost :D
Not sure what you mean by no OpenGL support, the Voodoo 5 has OpenGL support. Even the newer drivers give the Voodoo 2/3/4 OpenGL. What 2D issues did you have? From my testing the 2d quality on the Voodoo 5 is a lot better than the Geforce 2 (the geforce2 varied greatly depending on the board quality).
Does powerstrip allow overclocking of this card? I am curious what the performance difference is between the 4000 and the 4500 is, though one might as well just go for the 4500.
Keep in mind the 4000XT is a completely different chipset the 4000XT competed with the Geforce 2 MX while the 4500 competed with the mid/higher end. I've got both cards but haven't had the time to compare them directly.
The Kyro III would have been a really interesting chip. still beeing a rather lean design, with 130nm it might have been able to run at almost double the IIs clock at around 300mhz, with double the pixel pipes, DX8, TnL and faster DDR Ram. 2.5-3 times the performance should have been possible, which would have put it right into the faster geforce 4 regions, maybe even ahead in some titles. this would have meant quite some trouble for nvidia, especially with ATi and the R9700 around the corner. shame it wasnt released anymore, as far as i know the design was (close to) ready, there was just no manufacturer that was really interested in competing against Nvidia and ATI at that timeframe.
So just one point of clarification. You enabled EnTNL just for the one 3Dmark benchmark correct? It was disabled the rest of the time? I wonder how much of an impact the CPU has with EnTNL. If we did this same comparison in a Pentium4 or Athlon 64 for instance would EnTNL be more competitive. I might have to try it.
By default 3dMark 2000 uses "Athlon" option for TnL. I changed it to use EnTnL and that ended up being slower than doing TnL with the default Athlon option. Yes 3DMark 2000 will get a boost with a faster CPU.
I realize 3dmark 2000 will get a boost from a faster CPU. What would be interesting to see is does the gap between the performance of EnTNT and Athlon close at all.
I'd be surprised, you would think that both wills scale with more CPU power. It's likely that the Athlon code is highly optimised. Some games though, they might see a boost, might be something to look into.
I've just picked up an old Athlon 1400 system on a K7T266 board with the same Kyro 2 graphics card. rescued from certain death by dumpster. What would the best driver version be for 98 and if I can lay my hands on a faster Tbred CPU, would it make a big difference in performance?
Regarding Nvidia's performance in OpenGL, keep in mind that a lot of OpenGL developers tend to use proprietary plug-ins made by Nvidia, that benefit only Nvidia's cards, in order to simplify development.
geforce 2 brand is probably most boring gpu to choose when building retro pc =0 and on top of that it had dtx1 texture issue and really ugly 16bit dithering so it it produced subpar image quality in both older games running at 16bit and some newer games due to dtx1 textures being used. Notring really i would personally like to see again. Still I have one lying around because they are so common it is unavoidable ;P Kyro on the other hand have very good 16bit, maybe not the best but certainly very good and no issues with compressed textures. I might even buy one. Certainly worth to check it availability on auctions from time to time =)
i had a kyro2 the quake patches for powersgl arent hard to find, and make the card faster at quake ;) i had both cards, a high end gts and the kyro2 and loved the kyro, it was pretty damn strong for its day really for most games i played..the places it wasnt as fast, it was never enough i wanted to go back to the gts, the geforce2gts takes a hit from 32bit in alot of titles, check for powersgl patches for actual games like quake titles ;)
powervr also forced ati and nvidia to do their own tiling and similar culling of unseen data...at first in drivers(hahaha...sort of worked sometimes...lol...)
had a Kyro II with a amd chip at 1.4-1.6ghz at the time as i remember, for some games, many, it beat my geforece 2 gts and would run at higher resolutions in quite a few games(i think due to overdraw), the gts raped in a few titles though... also, the Kyro II can run PowerSLG games, the PowerSGL path when offered in games(often by another exe like 3dfx), when i found i could do that.. a few old titles i hadnt played in a few years...got reinstalled and the powersgl ver used... they are apparently working on a PowerVR based desktop chip again.....(i hope that news is true... 3 videos from reputable channels about it in recent months...)
Nvidia geforce 2 GTS was been released in 2000, same like stronger geforce 2 ultra while kyro2 was been introduced in 2001 and that was year of geforce 3, so comparing geforce 2 gts vs kyro2 is not absolutely OK
A great card for Win9x, but from what I saw on a certain chart you might've seen linked on VOGONS, the DOS gaming compatibility for the PowerVR chip is absolutely horrific. That would also be another thing that the NVidia card would excel at.
Oh, I didn't know that the DOS game compatibility matrix got updated even more, so that even Kyros are included. Looks indeed like Kyro is not suitable for DOS-gaming.
armorgeddon If you want to play Keen, Prehistorik, or certain other games, no. I believe from what I read, those have to do with certain EGA things those games used?
Yes, a lot of games, not only EGA-games, used tricks to access hardware in a certain way, so they only work correctly on hardware that is 100% compatible to the standards. In case of Keen they used those techniques to get smooth scrolling IIRC.
@@armorgeddon Also, feel free to help Gona with getting results of the SVGA compatibility for Pinball Illusions (Pinball Gold Pack on GoG). It'll need some work to make it transferrable from the pack's CD image to a CD, but I can say from a few of my tests (and a friend's), that not all cards work with 640x480 or 800x600.
![KSI - Dirty [Official Visualiser]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VoDh1h1dPUE/mqdefault.jpg)
It is worth mentioning, that when the Kyro II card was released it cost around 100$ less then the Geforce 2 GTS.
The premise of the Kyro II was "the power of a GTS with the price of an MX".
In poland the cost was around mx200 - im sure much less then mx400
*than
These videos are going to be a great source for future generations of historians, researchers and geeks. Great video as always!
This was a really nice comparison.
But we must remember that the Kyro II release with a MRSP of 149 US dolars. At a time when the Geforce 2 GTS was priced at 230.
So the Kyro II sit between the Geforce 2 GTS and the MX, ofering great performance for it's price.
What is really ironic is that now nVidia uses a tile based renderer, much like the Kyro II.
Phil, you're my favourite smaller RUclipsr! Keep up the good work!
Thank you, means a lot :D
I miss the old times where we had several GPU manufacturers so much... competition was awesome, cards had unique features, some were good for certain tasks and others for different things, etc. Today's 2 way battle between ati/amd and nvidia really sucks.
The same happens with the cpu market, we need Cyrix!
PowerVR is alive and doing very well in a mobile/handheld GPU market, so in theory they can return to PC market, if they really really wanted. Although I doubt they want any of it, tbh. Too much to lose and it's not worth it, when they feel perfectly fine and cozy in their niche.
@@kosmosyche They could make GPUs for laptops to ease into it.
What about MIPS cpus
I had the Hercules version, it was a decent card for it's time and it was nice to see another company trying to compete.
Shame PowerVR quit the consumer GPU market.
I just ordered the slower Kyro 4000. Very interesting cards.
I had a Hurcules 3D Prophet 4500 back in the day, it was a Kyro 2 card - I remember going to the PC store where my friend worked and asked advice about a GPU upgrade and it came down to these 2 card's - He said (putting it in terms I could understand as I knew not much about PC's back then) the GeForce is more expensive & a more powerful card that renders everything including stuff that's not displayed, the Kyro 2 on the other hand is cheaper and less powerful but only renders what is displayed making it more efficient, so I saved some cash and went with the kyro 2 - never regretted it :-)
That's actually impressive advice, that person knew what's going on :)
In regards to Serious Sam: this was a game for the Radeon 8500 - TruForm was shining there
I remember back in 2001 I was weighing up between getting the GeForce 2MX or a Kyro II. Picked the Kyro II for my AMD Duron system and was very happy till I upgraded to a Athlon XP 2400+ and a GeForce4 Ti 4200.
I viewed the Kyro II as a GeForce 2 1.5... halfway between an MX and GTS
PowerVR is still around they're one of the leaders in mobile 3D chips now. The Playstation Vita used a Power VR designed graphics chip for example.
Hey Phil! I had Kyro 1 back in the day, also paired with a 1GHz Athlon. One for the things I remember about that card was an option in the drivers to force textures to be compressed using S3TC or DXT1 I think. Anyway, because of the way the textures were compressed by the drivers on the fly, there was little to no performance penalty for using trilinear filtering as opposed to bilinear. Also, a few later programs would detect the software T&L option as being software, and would refuse to run IIRC. I think Spider-Man was one such game, and maybe No One Lives Forever. There was a program called 3D Analyze or Analyzer, something like that, that no only allowed you to trick the games into thinking you had T&L with just a checkbox, or even mask your card completely by entering a vender id into it. There were also options for setting max texture size and enabling / disabling pixel shaders. Obviously enabling them on a card like the Kyro series wouldn't actually allow them to use pixel shaders, but it would allow you to run games that checked for shaders and wouldn't boot without them. Often those games would still work well anyway, but lacked things like per pixel lighting or some bump mapping on objects.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The drivers have a ton of options that's for sure. Texture compression usually has nothing to do with speed, but improves the image quality as much larger textures can be used. But I could be wrong and it's something I don't think I'll get around to test at the moment as time is precious. Back in the day these little tweaks to get newer games, I see the appeal. But if you build something now, just get a newer GPU I would say.
texture compression doesn't usually have anything to do with speed. What I'm saying is that if you force texture compression in the drivers the it to will not have a performance penalty for enabling trilinear filtering when compared to bilinear. It's a quirk with the card.
Ok I get you now :) I looked into this further, and texture compression should give a speed advantage actually, as uncompressed will use more memory bandwidth. At least that's what I think is happening. Anyway, great tip!
@Kevin Sills If it's not mentioned then likely the last driver, but not the final beta driver.
You're an absolute legend. Not only do you try all this random crap your viewers ask, it must take AGES to do all this disk imaging and multiple consistent testing to get accurate results, all to make a 9 minute video. Are you in Brisbane? I'd love to buy you a drink!
Thanks. Yea it's heaps of work. Sorry mate, I live in WA quite remote.
Ha, I used to live in Perth, I know that feel.
Not in Perth anymore. Around 10 hours drive away :D
Just to add. I remember when this card first came out. Everyone pretty much came to the same conclusions as in this video. However hardware TnL was the future at least as far as Nvidia would have you believe. Also, a rumored Kyro III was suppose to include a TnL engine later on. No idea if they ever got to the stage where their were prototypes, probably not. If they had gotten to that point Nvidia would have had a problem on their hands. I miss GPU companies that were coming up with disruptive features. Could you imagine if 3DFX had bought Kyro instead of STB, and then if AMD had bought 3DFX instead of ATI? Or even if 3dFX continued on it's own till the present. Wonder what kinda of world we would live in from a GPU perspective if that had happened.
Nvidia is so good at introducing tech and making everyone believe you got to have it. But in reality, it takes years for that tech to get supported.
@@philscomputerlab Nvidia is just a green Apple, and it would be fantastic to imagine what would be for today's 3D graphics if simple technologies such as tile rendering and Glide would have evolved instead of getting stagnated.
I remember the kyro 2 being a very well regarded card back in the day
I had a 1 Ghz Athlon and Kyro II combo....I believe I had the Athlon overclocked as well.....I also won something from AMD. They sent me an Athlon T-shirt that I am literally wearing right now as I type this lol..... and the technical manuals for the Athlon.
This vid made me want to play Evolva. That bump mapping was amazing for it's time and it's a really unique game also.
The thing about openGL is that the developer specifies what is to be done but not explicitly how it is to be done. This allows for the driver to guess what the application is trying to do and pick the most efficient way for that. This means you can have game-specific optimizations that really matter; but that takes a lot of effort.
It is interesting to know that PowerVR still exist everywhere in any IOS device for instance but in even more other you can't imagine.
Wauw that just clicked for me now, I remember seeing the PowerVR name on the GPU’s on apple chips, oh my lord!
Great analysis of the varied results. Great video as always.
+1
3dfx (V1, V2, V3) Hercules Kyro 2, Matrox G450 and S3 Savage 2000 - my fave cards forever !
I remember wanting one of these cards back in the day.
I upgraded my Voodoo Banshee to a Kyro II. Even though the number were supposed to be solid, I think I ended up returning it because it just didn't seem smooth at the time. It was a really interesting chip. Always wondered why I can a weird experience.
It needed decent cpu
@@Stanwis I had the best AMD CPU at the time which as I recall was ahead of Intels best. But I felt it was all driver related. Maybe they got better but it was a really uneven experience.
I had a Radeon 8500 LE from Hercules (used with Athlon XP 2500@32000 and 2 GB of DDR RAM) that look t very much like the card in the video. Sold it later, abd bought GF 6600GT AGP. Still have Hercules sticker on my old case.
Nice. the Kyro ii was actually a good card specially for its price according to anandtech.
How does the Kyro II play DX 5-6 titles that rely on things like fog table? For example, Shadows of the Empire?
Hello mr. carmageddon ;D
Interesting results in this video particularly! You've done a lot of work with the Kyro 2 which is fab, there's not a lot already out there.
It's definitely one of the "odd-ware" type cards that are actually decent. I tried some S3, SIS and Trident cards, and they are odd for a reason :D
@@philscomputerlab oh yes! I'd love to see a vid on some of the real oddball video solutions from the 90's. And PhysX hardware - have you done that?
Loved my Kyro 2 back in the day. Cost the same as a GeForce 2 MX but had near GeForce 2 GTS performance. Tile-based rendering wasn’t just marketing hype and the card had a good picture quality. Also the kyros internal 32bit rendering meant that older titles that didn’t have 32bit rendering resolutions looked better
I have two of the 4500 64meg cards. Very Happy with them
The main rival of the GF 2 GTS was the V5 5500, would be nice to see a similar video with those 2 cards :) and also V4 4500 vs GF 2 MX :)
the Kyro II can also run the PowerSGL versions of quake and unreal games, and shows a great benefit from them, with no quality loss.
kyro II had great drivers, i mean compared to how inconsistant the drivers from nvidia and ati where back then, i would love to see them licence somebody a gpu design that was modern, they are very good cards when paired with a decent cpu, infact, with some titles, you could game at 1600x1200 with playable fps by simply turning off the cpu bound shadow effects.. (gpu shadows are the way to go...)
So why did PowerVR fold? They seemed like they were doing well.
I remember that Quake 2 had a "PowerVR OpenGL" renderer aside from the standard OpenGL one. Does it make any differences for the Kyro II? Did you try it?
It does? Bugger, no I didn't see that, would be interesting.
The PowerVR renderer was for the older PCX hardware that supported the SGL library. Kyro doesn't support SGL so the PowerVR miniGL won't work.
I wish the Kyro 3 had come me out. It had hardware t&l, programmable shader and DDR memory! So depressed it got cancelled. What could have been
Interesting note about the PowerVR Kyro II for you, Phil - it's got killer CPU scaling and lots of untapped potential. Try testing it with something like an XP 2100+ (or faster) and you'll see the Kyro really start to pull away from the GeForce.
I'm trying to get it to work in a much faster machine, not much luck at this stage :/
Really goes to show how NVIDIA's marketing machine destroyed the competition. I was a sucker for that machine. My last non-nvidia card at the time was the Voodoo3. I never even tried the PowerVR and ATI seemed like a second-class citizen. Now most of my retro machines use ATI Radeon 9xxx series. Really just luck of the draw and their DVI capability.
Thanks for the review!
Yes the early Radeon cards have weird DVI ports. For capturing, Nvidia are my go to cards, they just work with the DVI.
Very interesting, thank you!
around 7:11 I started seeing glitching on the video-- is this from the capture device?
Yea it's a capture glitch.
Rewatched it cause someone gave me for $0 the Hercules 3d Prophet 4500 cause he wasn't sure if it was working (same dude will also give me a Chaintech Geforce2 Ti 32mb). Luckily it's in perfect working condition! Haven't tested it yet properly except one game. In Max Payne with the geforce2 mx400 I got only 20fps on average. But with the Kyro II I'm now at 36fps!!
4:27 could the GTS2 have drop a buffer because of memory demanding?
Well I once tested the 32 vs 64 MB version of the GeForce 2 and I saw a difference at very high resolutions and high settings, but not much and only at more extreme settings.
I never heard of the Kyro II before the interactive build. Now I want to find one.
BTW does anyone know how much a monster 3D voodoo 2 cost at release?
The 12MB Version was 299 Dollars, or 600 DM here in Germany.
Maybe some MS-DOS compatibility tests for Kyro?
Kyro is bad for DOS-games: gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
is it my imagination or the game has some graphical glitchs? I see some horizontal lines appear, was that game with the colorful aliens recorded with the Kyro II or the GeForce 2?
Capture glitch, got to look into that.
I had a Kyro 2 Chip back in these days, think it was a Hercules Card. Problem were the drivers, not the speed at all. The PowerVR Team was much smaller then Nvidia and i think they had not enough capacities for writing good and stable drivers or maybe the games and applications were written Nvidia optimized. Later on the drivers got better and more stable but at the release they were horrible and nobody wanted to buy this chip because of that! Only freaks got a Kyro Chip but it was worth it. However, PowerVR had the IQ to compete with Nvidia and it would be cool to see them back in the ring!
Man, emulated TnL, I remember that. When WoW first came out I played it on a TNT2 with emulated TnL while I waited for my x850xt pe to ship. Other than all the terrain textures being rotated 90 degrees, it did surprisingly well at 25-30fps.
That's how it was back in the days. You just made due with what you have. Now going from a TNT2 to a X850 XT PE? DAMN, now that would have been a HUGE boost :D
I love you Phil! God bless!
Do you have access to Voodoo 5 5500 AGP?
I wonder compare Voodoo 5 vs GF2 GTS vs Kyro II
it's different era, 3dfx at the time GF2 GTS release already on process getting bought by nvidia.
Not sure what you mean by no OpenGL support, the Voodoo 5 has OpenGL support. Even the newer drivers give the Voodoo 2/3/4 OpenGL. What 2D issues did you have? From my testing the 2d quality on the Voodoo 5 is a lot better than the Geforce 2 (the geforce2 varied greatly depending on the board quality).
I would also like to know about Voodoo 5 5500 performance! Please Phil! 😎
Thanks for that, I always wanted to see that compare of that videocards. And can you try that videocards with faster Athlon CPU ?
Mind if I ask what the first gameplay footage shown in this video is of? The one where you play as a blue man fist-fighting space turkeys?
I put the name on the screen!
I had a kyro 2!!! I miss it!!!
did no one buy the Kyro II???? Why did PowerVR stop making GPU for the PC???
Pretty much, they are now doing mobile GPUs.
Does powerstrip allow overclocking of this card? I am curious what the performance difference is between the 4000 and the 4500 is, though one might as well just go for the 4500.
WaybackTECH Could be something for another video when I do a proper review of the Kyro II
Keep in mind the 4000XT is a completely different chipset the 4000XT competed with the Geforce 2 MX while the 4500 competed with the mid/higher end. I've got both cards but haven't had the time to compare them directly.
A passive cooled GF2 GTS? Where did you find it?
I have the Kyro II in my Siemens scovery PC. Nice card!
Nice card, a bit of a collectors item now. I hardly see anyone use it in their retro builds.
I had pentium 3 1Ghz with Creative GTS 64 DDR this was fast pc I use it from 2001-2005
Nice Kyro II i have my still today.
The Kyro III would have been a really interesting chip. still beeing a rather lean design, with 130nm it might have been able to run at almost double the IIs clock at around 300mhz, with double the pixel pipes, DX8, TnL and faster DDR Ram. 2.5-3 times the performance should have been possible, which would have put it right into the faster geforce 4 regions, maybe even ahead in some titles. this would have meant quite some trouble for nvidia, especially with ATi and the R9700 around the corner.
shame it wasnt released anymore, as far as i know the design was (close to) ready, there was just no manufacturer that was really interested in competing against Nvidia and ATI at that timeframe.
So just one point of clarification. You enabled EnTNL just for the one 3Dmark benchmark correct? It was disabled the rest of the time? I wonder how much of an impact the CPU has with EnTNL. If we did this same comparison in a Pentium4 or Athlon 64 for instance would EnTNL be more competitive. I might have to try it.
By default 3dMark 2000 uses "Athlon" option for TnL. I changed it to use EnTnL and that ended up being slower than doing TnL with the default Athlon option.
Yes 3DMark 2000 will get a boost with a faster CPU.
I realize 3dmark 2000 will get a boost from a faster CPU. What would be interesting to see is does the gap between the performance of EnTNT and Athlon close at all.
I'd be surprised, you would think that both wills scale with more CPU power. It's likely that the Athlon code is highly optimised. Some games though, they might see a boost, might be something to look into.
Can I suggest American Mcgee's Alice for tests? Such a great, old gem.
Had a look, doesn't seem to be on GOG or Steam.
I've just picked up an old Athlon 1400 system on a K7T266 board with the same Kyro 2 graphics card. rescued from certain death by dumpster. What would the best driver version be for 98 and if I can lay my hands on a faster Tbred CPU, would it make a big difference in performance?
I'd go with the latest drivers.
Regarding Nvidia's performance in OpenGL, keep in mind that a lot of OpenGL developers tend to use proprietary plug-ins made by Nvidia, that benefit only Nvidia's cards, in order to simplify development.
Ευάγγελος Θεοφίλης opengl always use native t&l so win of geforce it is not suprise.
do you have a recommendation for an agp 3.0 1.5v card for retro gaming?
Maybe you can find another pair of these two cards & do some overclocking performance with a bit better gpu coolers mounted on ?
AFAIK this was more or less the video chip included in the Dreamcast.
I have the pci version of the kyro II
also note, powervr is in alot of stuff, arcade and simulators use them as well...even now.
how to record screen on old computer without software?
Trade secret.
I’ve never heard/seen it referred to as “TNL” before, only ever as “T&L” (transform and lighting) 🤷🏻♂️
what game is that
I think Evolva looks better without bump-mapping. Very unique game.
The GeForce 2 drivers will let you run Windows 7 at 320x240 in 16 bit colors
hey, nice vid!
What game is that arround 7 min ?!?!?
Evolva
thx !
geforce 2 brand is probably most boring gpu to choose when building retro pc =0 and on top of that it had dtx1 texture issue and really ugly 16bit dithering so it it produced subpar image quality in both older games running at 16bit and some newer games due to dtx1 textures being used. Notring really i would personally like to see again. Still I have one lying around because they are so common it is unavoidable ;P
Kyro on the other hand have very good 16bit, maybe not the best but certainly very good and no issues with compressed textures. I might even buy one. Certainly worth to check it availability on auctions from time to time =)
Thanks for the reminder, I'll try to include this texture compression issue when I review the GF2.
i had a kyro2 the quake patches for powersgl arent hard to find, and make the card faster at quake ;)
i had both cards, a high end gts and the kyro2 and loved the kyro, it was pretty damn strong for its day really for most games i played..the places it wasnt as fast, it was never enough i wanted to go back to the gts, the geforce2gts takes a hit from 32bit in alot of titles, check for powersgl patches for actual games like quake titles ;)
powervr also forced ati and nvidia to do their own tiling and similar culling of unseen data...at first in drivers(hahaha...sort of worked sometimes...lol...)
had a Kyro II with a amd chip at 1.4-1.6ghz at the time as i remember, for some games, many, it beat my geforece 2 gts and would run at higher resolutions in quite a few games(i think due to overdraw), the gts raped in a few titles though... also, the Kyro II can run PowerSLG games, the PowerSGL path when offered in games(often by another exe like 3dfx), when i found i could do that.. a few old titles i hadnt played in a few years...got reinstalled and the powersgl ver used...
they are apparently working on a PowerVR based desktop chip again.....(i hope that news is true... 3 videos from reputable channels about it in recent months...)
There's much more difference in framerates depening on the game in a seemingly comparable cards.
Nvidia geforce 2 GTS was been released in 2000, same like stronger geforce 2 ultra while kyro2 was been introduced in 2001 and that was year of geforce 3, so comparing geforce 2 gts vs kyro2 is not absolutely OK
excellent!.
nVidia killed Kryo. I remember those situation well.
RIP and now PowerVR tops the smartphone GPUs...
Awesome :)
now Phil. Question is. How far can the athlon be overclocked?
powevr tech demo
A great card for Win9x, but from what I saw on a certain chart you might've seen linked on VOGONS, the DOS gaming compatibility for the PowerVR chip is absolutely horrific. That would also be another thing that the NVidia card would excel at.
Oh, I didn't know that the DOS game compatibility matrix got updated even more, so that even Kyros are included. Looks indeed like Kyro is not suitable for DOS-gaming.
armorgeddon If you want to play Keen, Prehistorik, or certain other games, no. I believe from what I read, those have to do with certain EGA things those games used?
Yes, a lot of games, not only EGA-games, used tricks to access hardware in a certain way, so they only work correctly on hardware that is 100% compatible to the standards. In case of Keen they used those techniques to get smooth scrolling IIRC.
@@armorgeddon Also, feel free to help Gona with getting results of the SVGA compatibility for Pinball Illusions (Pinball Gold Pack on GoG). It'll need some work to make it transferrable from the pack's CD image to a CD, but I can say from a few of my tests (and a friend's), that not all cards work with 640x480 or 800x600.
wackyjacky is that you ?
1600x1200