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Kyro II vs Radeon 64DDR VIVO

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May 4, 2001 3:11:55 PM

I am going to buy a new card for the next 13-15 months and i am on a limited budget so GTS ultra and GF3 are out of the question. I am between the Kyro II (hercules 4500) and the radeon 64MB DDR VIVO

Radeon has great color, good fps especially in high 32bit resolutions (i have a 19" monitor), hyper-z, great DVD support, VIVO (i am not going to use it alot but its good), some directX 8.0 support, T&L harware (not sure) but the fps are not good in 16bit, good lifetime???, good support for future games???

Kyro II has lower price (i dont think it would be a big difference with the radeon), hidden surface, great fps but not hardware T&L and good support for DX7.0 bad for DX8.0 ??, shorter lifetime??, not good support for future games???

My system is : MSI Turbo-R, Tbird 800 @880, 392 ram (256/133 and 128/100), Sony G400P 19".

I watch DVDs and i play a lot of games, alot of flight sims (falcon 4.0, Janes f-18, flanker 2.0) but other games too.

What do you think is the best solution between the two?

Thanks for your replies
Palpatine

More about : kyro radeon 64ddr vivo

May 4, 2001 3:32:09 PM

I would go for the Radeon. By the time the Kyro gets released the Radeon will be even lower in price. Plus the DVD capabilities of ATI cards cannot be matched right now.

As for your flight sim games the Radeon will handle them without a problem, they tend to stress out your processer more.

If you take a truth and follow it blindly, it will become a Falsehood and you a Fanatic.
May 4, 2001 4:33:08 PM

Also the Radeon has outstanding 2d in clarity and in speed. Its 2d actually has been tested and is faster then a GF2 2d besides a much better image. Check out Sharky comments on 2d on the cards here:

<A HREF="http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/super_he..." target="_new">http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/super_he...;/A>

Between the two the DVD ability of the Radeon is unmatched. Adaptive Deinterlacing is very observable and simply an excellent feature which no other cards have. Also the Radeon has additional hardware support of IDCT which allows using a 9bit error correction which the other cards don't use, other cards truncate the last bit and use 8 bits only. Also the hardware IDCT decreases cpu usage significantly allowing you to defrag, download, virus scan, compile etc. while watching a DVD effectively. Scaling a video on the Radeon while watching is virtually perfect while the others are not. Right now I am watching MSNBC as I am typing this in W2K. This is a feature I didn't think I would use that much either but I use it constantly and love it. It is just a time saver for me. Also remember that Adaptive De-interlacing is also done with the Video in. When text is displayed in the VideoIn you will be able to read the smallest text clearly, it is so good that I game away my 21" Zenieth TV set (I have a 21" workstation trinitron monitor). Video image quality puts to shame the best TVs at Circuit city. Since you have a high end high quality monitor a Radeon would be a good match there. If you like high quality rendered images in 32bit it is hard to beat the Radeon with its very efficient Anisotropic filtering which brings out the details in the furthest textures and gives a very rich depth to a game. Now the FSAA on the Radeon as far as I see it is very limited. If you have a 640x480 limited game like the game Riven then it works pretty good. The performance hit using FSAA beyond 800x600 is just not worth it because a higher resolution without FSAA is usually faster and looks better. For flight simulators the Radeon does well but its FSAA is limited on the current crop of flight simulators.

The Kyro2 outstanding FSAA would do you wonders in Flight Sims hands down. Its lack of T&L is meaningless for current FlightSims. FS2002 from Microsoft is a different story, it is optimize around a GF2 card meaning hardware T&L optimize. With a system like yours the hardware T&L will double the framerate with much improved image quality. I expect FS2002 to be out at the end of this year about 2 years after FS2000. It appears to be ready right now, here is a link that you might want to read:

<A HREF="http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/special/fs8hands.htm" target="_new">http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/special/fs8hands.htm</A>

The Kyro2 is a good design and card and will run virtually any game well that is out now. Future games like Max Payne and FS2002 it may start to be bogged down, due to the lack of hardware T&L. As time goes on and on the hardware will get used more and more in the advance cards, in which the Kyro2 will be hit. Still the Kyro2 should perform well in the next 12 months. If you have a 1.1ghz machine and above I think the lack of hardware T&L would be not as important.

If you are solely a flight sim franatic then a Kyro2 would be probably the best card until FS2002 comes out. If you do more then just play games then A Radeon starts looking very good.

Now the Ultras are becoming cheap, its FSAA due to its much increased GPU speed and memory will beat the Kyro2, plus it is much faster in FPS then the Radeon and Kyro2 in virtually everything. Its 2d is not as good nor its DVD/Video of the Radeon. It does have better drivers which is another consideration. Right now the Radeon drivers are very stable in both WinMe and W2k, W2k DX performance is some what slower then Win9x but has improved tremendously over time. OpenGL is equivalent if not faster in W2K. Games like FS2000 and others programed with W2K in mind perform virtually the same in Win9x and W2K on the Radeon. Still nVidia does have the best drivers around and also if you are looking at using linux then Nvidia is really the best way to go right now.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 05/04/01 12:42 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
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Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
May 5, 2001 12:56:18 PM

even with a tnt card dvd playback is good...
if you have a good cpu (more than 500 mhz) it will do what radeon does in hardware without any "frame lost"!
;) 

fs2002 may be using T&L like the most recent games out there (tribes 2, giants,seriously sam,black and white) and they rock on kyro 2 on good cpus...

T&L may not be an issue ever!
hardwire T&L will be "erased" by vertex shaders...<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by powervr2 on 05/05/01 09:00 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
May 5, 2001 5:58:17 PM

T&L as you well know is a issue and can be proven with 3dMark2001 especially with cpu's 1ghz and below. Up to 50% difference on a 667mhz machine buddy. If the game is optimize for Hard ware T&L and not Software T&L the Kyro2 will take a servere nose dive. Hopefully most new high featured games (time consuming) will have optimize rountines for the non T&L cards also. As it stands now FS2002 appears to be a hardware T&L optimized around a GF2 class card to operate at its best.

DVD quality varies much on the different chipsets, ATIs just doesn't do it better but much better. Still if someone wants to watch a TV quality DVD vice HDTV Quality and doesn't mind then a non ATI card would do ok.

"Harware T&L will not be erased by vertex shaders....." <b>False</b>

MaxPayne engine does this as you well know: (Game 3, Lobby demo in 3dMark2001)
Quote:
All the characters use vertex shader skinning except <b><font color=blue>if your system has a DirectX7 generation 3D accelerator, capable of hardware transformation and lighting.</b></font color=blue> Then skinning is done using a custom skinning technique, <b><font color=blue>which does skinning on the CPU, but transforms and illuminates the skinned vertices in the graphics hardware.</b></font color=blue> <b><font color=purple>This technique is more efficient for such cards because a vertex shader implementation would transform and light the vertices using the CPU, which would most likely be slower.</b></font color=purple> The empty shells and discarded guns are controlled by Ipion real-time physics by Havok.

This information is right there with 3dMar2001 under the help menu. This is the same weak argument you and Teasy tried to use before which is false. So please be corrected this time. The Kyro2 falls apart using this test because it is a lazy chip. It makes the cpu not only do the T&L but also the vertex shading, frankly overloading the cpu because this advance game engine has a state of the art particle physics engine needing the cpu. So by burdening the cpu with the T&L makes the game bogs way down on the Kyro2 even the GF2 MX cremates the Kyro2 here. FACTS PowerVR is what is needed.
May 5, 2001 7:16:06 PM

<font color=red>Anisotropic filtering which brings out the details in the furthest textures and gives a very rich depth to a game. </font color=red>

It would appear that the anisotrophic filtering on the radeon is more smoke than you might think....check this out:

<A HREF="http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/noncgi/Forum1/HTML/002283..." target="_new">http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/noncgi/Forum1/HTML/002283...;/A>

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Ncogneto on 05/05/01 03:18 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
May 5, 2001 8:25:20 PM

Do you have a Radeon? Why would you say that? I can tell the difference or are you telling me I don't see the things I see? I looked at the linked thread which started out pretty pathetic. Using beta drivers that was known to have caused problems (LEAKED) to make conclusions is pretty weak. Maybe I should delve into the awesome QuakeIII sky on a GF2 when using (cough cough) compressed textures. Anisotropic filtering on the Radeon works well as far as I see it. Now if you want to startup a new thread here dealing with it I will be more and happy to investigate the matter hopefully being more objective.
May 5, 2001 9:27:00 PM

First of all yes I have a radeon, as a matter of fact I have two, the 64 meg ddr vivo and a OEM le version. As well I have a gforce pro.

Furthermore you make an assumption that I am big fan of nvidia aka gforce.....An assumption I might add that is incorrect.

I do love my Radeon's ( ati still needs work with there drivers, at least the install part that is whacked IMHO).

I merely posted this to get your pespective on it as I had stumbled across it myself last night. By no means was I trying to start a flame war with you so settle down. If you take the time to read some of my earlier post I actually recomend the radeon over the mx many times (yes I have an mx too!)

After carefully following your post in the Kyro-II thread(s) I came to a conclusion that you had a very good understanding of the workings of video cards, the radeon in particular.

Now, this being said, I have been able to produce the same results as the author of that thread. It would appear that( if I may quote another user in that thread)

1: Radeon does not do anisotropic with mipmap blending (trinlinear anisotropic, so to speak).
2: Radeon selects mipmaps based on depth (Z) rather than range. This makes any area that is not directly in front of the view have LOD that is slightly negative.
3: There is a bug that makes far off mipmaps on polygons with horizontal or vertical vanishing points blurry.

Now all of this is a minor moot point, as to the fact I was totally unaware of it until It was stuck in front of my face and pointed out to me. Still does not change my opinion of the radeon per say but a certain reference to the Diamond viper 2ooo and its alledged support of hardware T&L comes to mind.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
May 5, 2001 10:01:23 PM

Huh? Why did you think I ask you if you had a Radeon or not? I wanted to find out. I made no assumptions but it appears that you did about my assumptions. Obvious my wording or tone would tend to make someone believe that. None the less I would be interested in diving into this matter that is if you are interested. Plus by you having both a Radeon and another card will help matters tremendously to dissect this matter a little bit better. Something for me to learn more about also. I don't claim to be an expert about anything, well except maybe about myself. Pretty limited huh? Well if you want to dive in that world of analysis on the Radeon that would be great. Do you have a FTP site or service where images can be compared? Oh one more thing, check out this article if you have the time, I know, it is about benchmarking but isn't that what we are doing? Comparing the effectivness or quality or performance of the Radeon Anisotropic filtering ability?

<b>Benchmarking: The Money Game</b>
<A HREF="http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT0501..." target="_new">http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT0501...;/A>
May 5, 2001 11:30:02 PM

To be quite honest with you noko, this may be a little over my head. I know a great deal about some things but the intracacies of video cards is not one of them. I can only say that I have produced the same type of pictures as the thread I brought to your attention. I do plan on reading ( yes and learning) more on this as time warrants. And no I do not have an ftp sight.
to be more precise it is not the effectiveness of the radeons anisotropic filtering that is in question but the fact that if it can do both at the same time ( anisotropic filtering and mip map blending) as ATI claims or if in fact they are pulling the wool over our eyes.

Yes, I have seen the link you have menitoned and agree completely with what it pertains to. However, I am not comparing the radeon to another card at this time, just question whether or not it can do what it claims?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
May 5, 2001 11:53:49 PM

Well I will do the same and see what I can come up with. I will post images when I am ready, with the hopes of finding what compromises ATI decided to make if any on Quality and Performance. That may be one of them which explains why the Radeon Anisotropic filtering doesn't take as big of a hit. The GF2 seems to take a lower sample number vice the Radeon so as to not be hit as much. Just remember basing something on one program may not be that accurate since the program may have conflicts with the hardware, drivers etc. If a broad number of programs exhibit the same characteristics plus different drivers then a call would be appropriate based on the degree of evidence. Then a decision to determine if that was a wise choice or hardware limitation by ATI. For example the Anisotropic Filtering on the Kyro2 takes a 50% hit due to doubling the number of clocks in order for it to do the filtering. This 50% reduction would probably make a number of games in higher resolutions not as playable using anisotropic filtering. Now the Radeon doesn't have that kind of performance degradation but maybe the compromises ATI made effects the overall quality in which I am interested in. Let me know what you come up with.
Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
May 6, 2001 9:25:08 AM

I don't know but probably they (kyro guys) didn't compromise the quality!
But I don't know much on kyro anisotropic...
;) 

what I know is that trilinear with texture compression with kyro is more than normal trilinear ...<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by powervr2 on 05/06/01 05:26 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
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