Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing Performance
The second new game we added to our benchmark suite is Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing. We thought it was important that we add a second, and more recent D3D game into the lineup. Before we head to the benchmarks, it is necessary to point out a few things.
First off, the asterisk next to the Voodoo5 5500 is there to show that the Voodoo5 5500 was tested with the 24-bit texture option off. Failure to turn this check box off on the Voodoo5 5500 resulted in extremely poor performance regardless of the resolution.
The second thing to point out is that it was in Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing that we experienced some driver problems with the Kyro II. During the benchmark, we noticed textures that were supposed to be invisible actually appearing in some frames during playback. As a picture is worth a thousand words..
In the first picture above, one can see tire tracks that should clearly be behind the truck. The second picture shows brake lights, which once again should not be visible in the rendered scene, coming through the front of the truck.
Looks like the Kyro II still needs some driver work. Regardless of the rendering problems, let's see how the card performs in this game.
The Kyro II takes a position it is not used to assuming when in MB Truck Racing at 640x480x32. This time around, we can attribute the poor performance not only to the lack of T&L but also to the driver problem described above.
Unfortunately, not much changes for the Kyro II when the resolution is increased to 1024x768x32. Keep in mind that these results should be taken with more than just a grain of salt, as the demo playback was clearly not working 100% correctly with the Kyro II drivers.
Finally, at 1600x1200x32, the Kyro II remains near the bottom of the charts. Still beating out the Radeon SDR as well as the Voodoo5 5500, the Kyro II could be limited by its broken drivers. Let's hope STMicroelectronics can fix this problem in the near future.
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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.