Expected Price: $149
Waste is a terrible thing - take the traditional 3D graphics pipeline, for instance. In order to render a scene, the graphics accelerator draws all of the polygons that comprise the scene, shades and textures these polygons, and finally, runs a test on the Z-buffer to determine which of the polygons are visible. As you may guess, the polygons that are not visible get discarded, but only after they have run through the 3D pipeline, consuming fill rate and that ever-precious memory bandwidth.
For the past few years, Imagination Technologies has been employing a different means of delivering dashing 3D. However, problems have plagued various iterations of their PowerVR architecture up until recently. Be it buggy drivers, forgettable performance or tardy hardware releases, PowerVR was simply not compelling for the gaming enthusiast (unless you own a Sega Dreamcast - equipped with a second generation PowerVR processor). Determined to overshadow the bad press received by these previous products, VideoLogic and STMicroelectronics teamed up for the third incarnation of the PowerVR series, named KYRO. Clocked at a paltry 125MHz, nobody expected much from KYRO other than buggy drivers and poor availability. To the hardware community's surprise, KYRO gave NVIDIA's GeForce 256 a run for its money using nothing more than "old school" single data rate memory and that highly efficient rendering architecture. The phrase "work smarter, not harder" had been embodied.
Now, nearly a year later, STMicroelectronics has prepared the successor to the KYRO, aptly named KYRO II, and teamed up with graphics veteran Hercules to manufacture the 3D Prophet 4500. We flew to Phoenix, Arizona to cover the launch of the KYRO II and listen to what Hercules had to say about their newest product. Now, we've got one of these deceptively simple-looking boards in our lab to compare against the other mainstream solutions from the likes of NVIDIA and ATI.