UnrealTournament Performance
In Unreal Tournament at 640x480x32, the Kyro II does what some would consider the impossible, especially for a card in the sub $150 price range: it beats the $340 GeForce2 Ultra.
The Kyro II does the same thing, meaning that not only is the minimum frame rate at 640x480x32 higher than any other card, so is the average frame rate.
As the resolution increases, the Kyro II cannot maintain its top of chart position. The performance of the card still remains very strong, falling into a group that consists of the GeForce2 GTS 64MB and the Radeon DDR 64MB.
The average frame rate of the card at 1024x768x32 reflects the results observed in the minimum frame rate measurements.
The Kyro II does not perform as well in Unreal Tournament at 1600x1200x16 as we have seen it do in the past. Here, the Kyro II still ready handedly beats the GeForce2 MX, the Radeon SDR, and the Radeon DDR 64MB, but falls short of the GeForce2 series cards.
Same results in the average frame rate here as in the minimum frame rate.
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MonkeyPaw - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link
Thanks for the stroll down memory lane (by keeping the article up). I had one of these cards back in 2002, and it was one I looked back upon fondly. I can't remember most of the GPUs I owned from yesteryear, save the Voodoo 3 and the crappy S3 Verge. That's fairly elite company, at least in my brain, anyway. :)xrror - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Yea, it's sad that there wasn't any further development of the Kyro series in the PC market. If I remember right (probably needs fact checked) Imagination's development resources got sucked into the Sega Dreamcast after this point. Even that wouldn't have been so bad if Sega hadn't just given up on the Dreamcast so early on due to a "poor showing in Japan" (nevermind everyone loved it in the US but we didn't count apparently, also see Genesis/MegaDrive).I think Imagination or at least their tech lives on in the embedded/mobile space now, but meh - really wanted to see what they could have done with their tech without being shackled to a power budget in 2002-2005 era PC's.
Alexvrb - Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - link
You're wrong. The Dreamcast was designed years earlier using PowerVR Series 2. The later "Kyro series" was based on Series 3. The DC design win netted them some much needed cash which they used to fuel their Series 3 releases. What killed imgtech was their inability to play well with others (board partners) and issues staying on schedule for releases. If they had managed to get the 4800 out the door sooner, and released the larger Kyro III with DDR it would have bought them some time. Especially if they had paired it with a hardware T&L block like Elan.thegreatjombi - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
Its very interesting to think that Imagination Technologies could have been another foot note in history (3dfx, bitboys Oy! Rendition..) but going mobile and refining their technology has allowed them to basically become more popular than ATI(AMD) or Nvidia. There are probably more devices in peoples houses running a powervr variant than have an AMD or Nvidia GPU.I do wish someone would stick their chip on a discrete card again, they apparently support full Directx and OpenGL! could be an interesting low profile, low end, low power, fanless card for HTPCs.