September'2001 3Digest: STMicroelectronics KYRO 64 MBytes

This chip is presented by reference STM KYRO 64 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

STM KYRO chip, 115 MHz clock rate, 128-bit engine;
64 MBytes SDRAM memory in eight IBM 6.8ns microchips, 115 MHz clock rate;
Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 115 megapixels/sec and 230 megatexels/sec.
Tile architecture.

Overclocking is unavailable.

The release of KYRO, a new generation of the PowerVR chip, has illustrated another try to conquer the market with unusual processor architecture. We've written about tile architecture rather long ago. But the original price of KYRO couldn't make it competitor to NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, besides there few manufacturers of these cards. But the product has been released and its price and perfomance could have made it the real competitor to NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, but the lack of manufacturers spoils the competition.

For the 20th of September'2001 the latest drivers from STM - 7.01.14.

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As we can see, latest version drivers are preferable, first of all due to fixed bugs. But still there is criticism about stability. E.g. Giants may lock-up on Pentium IV platform (when resolution is higher than 1024x768). Upon the whole, KYRO / KYRO II work unstable and abruptly on new platforms.

Unstable perfomance in Serious Sam was caused by strict 100% usage of 32-bit color in the Quality mode, and before we have used the default Quality settings and not all effects have been actually 32-bit. But the main reason to explain the perfomance boost in 32-bit color is the usage of S3TC in the latest 7.01.11 version that gives nice results!

Still there are quality problems. I.e. No One Lives Forever has Z-buffer bugs: