Imagination Technologies / STMicro PowerVR Series 3: KYRO

Quake III Arena - Athlon 750

The KYRO really did not like our Athlon testbed. On top of frequent crashes, the system would lockup every time the resolution was switched. Once again, this problem is no doubt a result of our early alpha drivers, so expect this problem to be fixed before the card is sold on the market.

We see that at 640x480, the KYRO is limited by its alpha drivers, as speed here is not as impressive as in other resolutions. Noteworthy is the fact that the KYRO actually comes on top over the Voodoo5 5500, a card also tested with very early driver sets.

Essentially tied with the Voodoo5 5500, the KYRO is still suffering from it's crippled drivers at 800x600. The card performs 17% slower than the 32 MB DDR GeForce at 800x600x32, but performs 20% faster than the 32 MB SDR GeForce.

Once again, the true potential of the KYRO begins to be seen at 1024x768x32. At this resolution, the card actually performs slightly faster than the 64 MB and 32 MB GeForce DDR cards. The performance seems weak when compared at 16-bit color mode, but as stated in the Quake III Arena 800x600 Pentium III 550E section, this is to be expected.