Actually, Kyro isn't crap.
I'm surprised by the number of people having troubles with it. The ONLY problems I've had are those listed in my previous post.
The impression I'm getting is that people are expecting the card to be a plug and forget card. That it will do everything it you want it to do without care. That is not the case. It has a vast array of options that need to be played with for each game to capture best performance.
For instance:
I decided to see how well it ran that old classic Jedi Knight. At 1024x768 my old card (a Hercules TNT, FABOO card with the 2.08 drivers) I was getting around 60 FPS.
Trying to run it with my D3D options set as they were for the Kyro, the game wouldn't give me 35!!!!
So, I did some reading of the on-disc manual provided (very comprehensive. I love it!) and learned myself what each of the options did. After disabling some stencil buffers an enabling Texture compression, I now max out at 140 FPS at 1280x1024. No performance degridation and the image is sharper! (BTW, had to disable W buffering on that too, Jedi Knight wouldn't render properly.)
So, that leaves my two aforementioned woes. Real Myst and no AGP texturing.
Here's an update:
I've got Real Myst working!! VERY nice with my card. The trick was to get a little known patch (ver 1.1.1, it's little known now since mattelsupport.com no longer supports the game and Ubi Soft doesn't have it. Have to grab it from a message board. I'm planning on posting it on
www.driversguide.com later today for those who want it.) and no everything is fine. ALmost. I have some artifacting with shadows and reflections in water. BUt I believe this to be a combination of very early drivers for the card (7.89, which according to TomsHardware is still beta stage) and the fact Real Myst can be anal and really only wants an Nvidia chip. But hey, It's running pretty now!
As for the AGP texturing, someone on the Hercules forum site tells me that AGP texturing acceleration isn't necessary for cards with 64MB of RAM and up. I am very suspicous of this and I'm still researching that.
All in all, I have no troubles with the card. Evenwhile using DX 8. I've gone back to 7.0a and haven't noticed any performance increases. I'll be playing with 8.1 beta later.
The Jolly Wizened Oaf!