There are many different types of textures that can be applied to almost any polygon: from regular image textures to light textures to bump-mapped textures, each providing an added sense of realism to 3D objects. Textures are applied as "layers" to the objects that they are bound to, so if a designer wishes to apply a light-map texture on top of the base image texture, that polygon requires two layers of textures. Observe:

This is what we call multi-texturing and the KYRO is the mother of all multi-texturing graphics accelerators. Take NVIDIA's GeForce2 GTS, for example: this powerful chip has two layers of multi-texture support. This means that the GeForce2 GTS is capable of rendering a maximum of 2 texels, or two texture layers, per pixel. If the number of texels exceeds 2, then the GeForce2 GTS has to use multi-pass to render the scene, meaning that it has to go back and redo those layers that it can't fit into one pass, which reduces both performance and image quality. ATI's Radeon graphics accelerator has support for 3-layer multi-texturing. So, by using the above example with the GeForce2 GTS, we can conclude that it is capable of rendering a maximum of 3 texels per pixel.

Now, the Radeon seems to have an advantage over the GeForce2 GTS here because of it's 3-layer multi-texturing support. This is one of the main reasons why the GeForce2 GTS fails to render ATI's demo scene for the Radeon because of how the demo uses an abundance of 3-layer textures.

Now, 3-layers may sound impressive when compared to the GeForce2 GTS's 2-layer support, but wait until you hear this: the KYRO has a whopping 8-layers of multi-texture support. Now, I don't know of any games that utilize 8-layer multi-texturing, but I'm sure that once games start using it, they will look more realistic than ever and will cost the KYRO little to virtually no performance drop.

On to: The Evil KYRO