A Torrid Affair with Graphics: April 2001 3D Market Update

One month until Kryo II

Without a doubt, ST Micro’s Kyro II has become the hit that the original Kryo never seemed to excel to be.  Even more interesting is the fact that the chip is still a month away from release yet it has attained this level of stardom very quickly, can you see why NVIDIA felt defensive?

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As I mentioned at the start of this editorial, the Kyro II isn’t without its problems.  We have been working closely with Hercules to get the latest driver set and board revision of their Kyro II based 3D Prophet 4500 unfortunately we haven’t seen anything since our original review of the card.  We are holding off on a follow-up until we get a final board as well as final drivers since there are a number of issues with the current hardware.

For starters, compatibility with i815 platforms seems to be relatively poor with the board we have as well as boards that have been sent to other reviewers.  We would experience 2D artifacts and random lockups on our i815 test beds, regardless of the motherboard used.  Even using Intel’s own i815 board did not solve the problems, although we did not experience any of these on our Athlon test bed.  It was a bit of a shock to see this, especially after remembering the days when AGP cards would have compatibility problems with AMD systems yet worked perfectly with Intel systems.  How times have changed, luckily it only seems prevalent with the pre-release Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 that we have in lab.  Hercules has assured us that they are working on fixes for these problems, although until we see a final board we’re going to hold off on accepting that statement just yet. 

Hopefully Hercules under the management of Guillemot will have more sense about releasing products that aren’t ready for prime time than the original Hercules corporation did when they released their Terminator BEAST card over two years ago.

On the driver side of things, apparently quite a bit of progress has been made internally.  Mercedes Benz Truck Racing is now working properly, which is more than can be said about the title on the GeForce3’s current drivers.  There has also apparently been a number of fixes under titles such as the Aquanox test that we used in our GeForce3 Review. 

Overall we are still very impressed with the Kyro II, however after play testing it for days on end there are still a significant amount of driver issues (at least with the driver build used in our review) that would prevent us from flat out recommending the card with the utmost confidence in it.  Hercules has a month to change our minds, let’s see what happens as they have stated the card will hit the streets on May 16^th.