A Speedy Tiler: Kyro II on Hercules' 3D Prophet 4500

Chip Features

STMicro's Kyro II has the following features:

• 175 MHz chip clock rate
• 175 MHz memory clock rate (synchronous with chip clock rate)
• Tile Based Rendering (TBR), but no T&L
• 0.18 micron processing technology
• Memory interface for SDR SDRAM
• Expandable by 64 MBytes maximum
• Memory bus width 128 bits
• RAMDAC 270 MHz
• Interface AGP 2X
• 4X full-scene anti-aliasing available
• Motion compensation for DVD/MPEG-2

At first, the Kyro II's feature set doesn't really sound tempting. For example, a 270 MHz RAMDAC is no longer state of the art. AGP 2X isn't much of a selling point, either. What is crucial, though, is how it performs. We'll see in the benchmarks that the Kyro II can more than hold its own against the competition in terms of performance.