Much like how NVIDIA has their own set of benchmarks and demos to show of the features and speed of their products, STMicro also has a set of their own benchmarks and demos--one of which is VillageMark. Because of how the rendering pipeline is organized in tile-based rendering, the more overdraw a scene has, the faster the KYRO will render when compared to conventional 3D accelerators. VillageMark, as you might expect, has loads of overdraw because of the hundreds of over-lapping buildings in the scene, and thus, we should expect a huge boost in performance when comparing the KYRO to the two GeForce2's.

Below are screenshots of what VillageMark looks like:

Keep in mind that the only color-depth supported by VillageMark is 16-bit, so all tests were conducted at 16-bit color-depth.

As you can see right off the bat, VillageMark is a very tough benchmark, even for the KYRO, which is what the benchmark was built around. At the lower resolutions, we see the KYRO stablize at 76 FPS. From this, you would think that the results were limited by the platform, which, it is not, as you can see from the following graph of running the benchmark on our low-end system:

No, what you're seeing is not a direct duplicate of the results found on the high-end system above. True, the results that I had obtained from both systems were 100% identical! This takes me to believe that this benchmark is almost 100% video subsystem-intensive and does not stress the system platform at all!

We see how both the NVIDIA cards suffer from the lack of tile-base rendering. Even at a resolution as low as 800x600, the powerful, and usually dominating GeForce2 GTS, cannot even manage a playable 30 FPS. The GeForce2 MX is even worse, as it starts off at 640x480 at only 38 FPS.

On to: Conclusion