General Impressions
System and Game Compatibility
As mentioned earlier initially I did have considerable trouble with getting the Vivid! to work at all with my system, due to a resource conflict with my Adaptec SCSI controller card that I could not resolve; once I had brought this to their attention though Videologic soon released a BIOS update for the Vivid! that cured these conflicts, and enabled the board, and my system, to run as they should.
After the BIOS update, during desktop operations the compatibility and stability of the of the board seemed fine; no apparent video related hangs, stalls or 'Blue Screens Of Death'!
3D compatibility was OK, but not without a few issues. Besides the issues mentioned throughout the review in getting some of KYRO's features to work with games, I did encounter a few other issues; for instance the text in Colin McRae Rally 2 was all distorted and the game refused to work in AGP4X mode for some reason. Every OpenGL title I tried though appeared to run absolutely fine.
2D Image Quality
Before using the board I will admit I was concerned that the normal 2D image quality wouldn't be that great, as I was aware that it only has a 270Mhz RAMDAC. 270MHz would seem to be quite low in this day and age; since the Voodoo3 release virtually everybody has followed 3dfx's suit and gone with 350Mhz RAMDAC's. However, this proved to be nothing more than one of those little 'mental hurdles' you need to get over if you are considering purchasing a board of this class; bigger (numbers) is not necessarily better! In actual fact, having checked the figures, the 270Mhz RAMDAC supports 1600x1200x16.7 million colours (my preferred resolution) up to 85Mhz, which is actually 10Mhz more than my 19" Mitsubishi DiamondPro 900U monitor supports at this resolution. I would guess anyone considering buying a card in this segment probably won't have a monitor that supports beyond 1600x1200; those that do will probably also have the money for a far more expensive video card!
In the end I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by 2D the output of the Vivid. The most descriptive term I can come up with is 'crisp'; the quality was clean, with good colours straight off (which can be adjusted using the 'E-Color' controls included). I ran the desktop at 1600x1200 for most of the duration of time I used the board with no I'll effects; slight flicker was only noticeable through the peripheral of my vision.
DVD Playback
Software DVD playback seemed to be fairly good using the supplied WinDVD2000 software.
The Video Overlay failed to initialise at 1600x1200x16.7 Million colours, and so a drop in resolution is required. Once running though the quality seemed good, and the motion fluid. Watching the action sequences in Gladiator showed little problems; I only noticed a small 'stuttering' during the opening battle scene where they are panning across the landscape and there are literally hundreds of soldiers on the move in the scene.
The board, however, has no TV-Out functionality meaning that software DVD playback will be limited to watching DVD videos on your monitor - something I personally rarely have the patience to do during the duration of a movie!
Conclusion
Well, what can I say about the Vivid! to sum it all up then?
Quite obviously the PowerVR architecture is very innovative, giving performance that any card in its price bracket would be proud to achieve, and even on occasion some of the more expensive cards. The PowerVR architecture also allows Vivid! a number of other benefits, such as 8 layer multitexturing, that given a chance could be very useful. Also, it has few features that not many cards in this bracket have, but again we need to see more content actually utilising these features.
So, that's my only word of warning: Vivid! is an very impressive card - ESPECIALLY in this price category, but I hope that Imagination Technologies and their partners have enough push with the developers to see its features be fully utilised so that we, the end user, can get the maximum benefit from it. In an industry where price considerations is one of the more important factors when it comes to either retail or OEM, I feel that the KYRO/Vivid! is evidence of good technology, sound investment and most importantly for consumers, value for money.
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