Imagination Technologies / STMicro PowerVR Series 3: KYRO

The Drivers

The KYRO board being tested testing is 30 - 60 days from the actual shipping date. With this in mind, it is no surprise that the drivers that came with our card were anything but stable. These drivers, referred to as "early alpha" by the folks at PowerVR, gave us numerous problems, including system lockups. Further, we did notice some visual anomolies during game play, but these were not due to the architecture of the chip, but simply immature drivers. Therefore, keep in mind that the descriptions and pictures below are likely to change with time.

The KYRO's drivers incorporate the standard features we have come to expect with modern day video drivers, with little more. Those of you that remember the PowerVR Series 2, the Neon 250, will be happy to hear that the KYRO includes a full OpenGL ICD, so it is no longer necessary to deal with miniport drivers. Although DXTC and S3TC are the same algorithm, Imagination Technologies and STMicro dont't yet have a license for S3TC, which prevents them from including texture compression support in OpenGL. It is, however, something they are looking into for the future.

The driver utilities themselves are also the standard fare we see today. There is the standard "display" page that contains some basic monitor information as well as a few features for moving the screen display and adjusting the gamma correction. The next tab over brings the user to the LCD screen, where one can adjust what signal the DFP port is sending out as well as adjust the gamma correction on this monitor. The final tab is the "3D Optimization" tab which includes the OpenGL and Direct3D settings that we have come to look for. Under the OpenGL tab you will find the standard set of tweaking options we see on compatible driver sets. The Direct3D tab reveals the same thing: with features such as FSAA.

The KYRO driver set is not especially visually impressive or technically powerful. Mainly the driver tabs act as they should: allowing the user to tweak different settings of the card. It is possible that we will see a slight design change between these drivers and the shipping drivers. It's worth noting that Imagine Technologies already has alpha Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 drivers as well, so support under those operating systems should be available at the release.