|
PowerColor Evil KYRO
By Tikkler - December 10, 2000
 | Infobox |  |
|
|
|
Ever since 3Dfx (with a capital D at that time) released their first Voodoo accelerator to the graphics acceleration market a few years ago, the market has seen many innovative products, each aimed to push the limits of graphics technology. Some aimed for 2D quality (Matrox), some for video playback (ATI), but none more heated is the market for 3D acceleration. There's only so much you can advance in 2D and, although video playback and acceleration is important, it still poses a limit as to how much you can innovate with. With 3D, you have virtually no limits as to how much demand you can generate and, therefore, how much of a need for new and innovative technology there is as we can create ever-complex 3D scenes and have them rendered in real time.
After the release of the original Voodoo, the 3D acceleration market has seen the rises and falls of mighty corporate empires. First came S3: being the first out the gate with a 3D accelerator, they were hugely criticized for the incredibly poor performance of their Virge 3D accelerator (or decelerator, as how it was labeled by some). Then came 3Dfx with their Voodoo line of products that, as a matter of fact, performed very well for that time and was praised as the "ultimate gaming card." It was not after the release of the 3rd encarnation of the Voodoo line, the Voodoo3, that 3dfx (now with a lowercase d, after its merger with STB) began to loose its grip on the 3D accelerator market to a company called NVIDIA, which we now know so well.
NVIDIA, with their TNT2 graphics processor, seemed ready to take on the world when their product, in terms of performance, was neck to neck with the Voodoo3, but had a huge advantage over its fierce competitor--it was capable of rendering in 32-bit colors. As many of us may recall, when 3dfx was designing their Voodoo3, they had neglected to include support for 32-bit rendering, simply downplaying the feature and saying how much of a performance loss it will instill and how, in terms of graphics quality, there was not much of a difference at all. It's competitors, namely NVIDIA and ATI, set out to prove 3dfx wrong and, as history shall tell, each produced products that did just that. ATI, with its Rage128, and NVIDIA, with its TNT2, both showed 3dfx that it was possible to render in 32-bit without a significant loss in performance. That is when NVIDIA rose to its fame, as its TNT2 product was the fastest of the three, although ever-so close to the Voodoo3, and that is when 3dfx saw their piece of the pie slowing chipping away.
Since then, we've seen NVIDIA's bit increase to a large piece of the pie and 3dfx's shrink to a measly portion. NVIDIA, now being recognized by some as the Intel of the graphics world, has the world's fastest GPU, their GeForce2 Ultra (although, it's also the world's most expensive consumer level 3D accelerator). 3dfx, after some rumors in the year 2000, is no more: it is now in the middle of being gobbled up by its biggest competitor, NVIDIA. ATI, which had previously specialized in their above-all video/DVD playback quality, has also jumped on board the high-performance 3D acceleration market with their Radeon GPU that performs neck to neck with, if not better than, NVIDIA's GeForce2 GTS offering in some cases. S3, after being the first to design a 3D accelerator and later tried to gain some market-share with their poor-performing and buggy Savage4 and then the Savage2000, is no longer in the graphics acceleration business.
Yet after all these years of innovation in terms of 3D acceleration, all of the most popular products available today are still using a technique that first originated in the 1960's for generating CAD graphics. However, two companies working together, STMicro and Imagination Technologies think that a need for change is finally here and, through their new chipset called the KYRO, being the name of their PowerVR Series 3 graphics chip, utilizes a completely different rendering technique that the two companies hope will take the world by storm. It is called Tile-based rendering...
 On to: Tile-Based Rendering Explained
|
