VideoLogic Vivid! PowerVR series 3 KYRO

Introduction - Competing in today's unforgiving video card industry is no walk in the park. It takes a lot of innovation to emerge as a worthy contender and succeed, and when you do get up there, it takes a lot to stay up there. However, things have changed quite a bit since 2 years ago. No longer are gamers concerned with just big numbers in the video cards specs, but rather they like to see more advanced features. One example is the case with Nvidia, who with more pleasing features such as 32bit coloring and hardware transform & lightening in addition to superior performance, was able to ascend over it's potent competitors.

So it takes guts for the little guy to be different. After all, with video cards with over 180 MHz clock speeds and fillrate claims of over 700 Megapixels/sec, PC gamers are going to be a little skeptical of a video card with only 115MHz memory/core clock speed. Well, this little guy is PowerVR's series 3 chipset, KYRO, designed by Imagination Technologies and constructed by STMicro. What's so especial about it, you ask? This one doesn't claim that "fillrate is king" like the others, but rather it claims that "only effective fillrate is king".

Enter Vivid, based on the PowerVR series 3 KYRO graphics chipset, it's the latest video card from VideoLogic, a division of Imagination Technologies. With a suggested retail price of only $130 USD, this video card is clearly targeted towards the mainstream and value market. The main competitions would be Nvidia Geforce2 MX and ATI Radeon SDR. With support for full scene anti-aliasing, environment mapped bumped mapping, Internal True Color, 8-layer multi-texturing and dual rendering pipelines, the KYRO has some impressive features that definitely make it a worthy contestant. Yet, what really separates it from the rest is it's tile-based rendering architecture.

Let's have a look at the specs.