3D Performance (A.K.A Benchmarks!!)

The benchmarking test system was as follows:

Intel Pentium3 733 Coppermine
ASUS CUSL2 Motherboard
128MB PC133 RAM
SoundBlaster Live!
PCI Ethernet card
Adaptec 19160 SCSI card
Vivid! Bios V1.96
Vivid! Driver Version 1.00.05.0115

MDK2 Demo

First off the block is the OpenGL MDK2 demo. The settings for the game were as follows:

Texture Quality: Max
Filtering: Bilinear
Mipmapping Enabled
Software T&L

The fillrate graphs indicate that right up to 1024x768x16 without FSAA the review system with the KYRO enabled is Geometry limited; without a T&L engine this isn't surprising. However the card is still sustaining above 60FPS at 1024x768x32 - considering the low pixel/texel fillrate, and bandwidth of the card this seems an astonishing feat! I will admit to being a little surprised by the performance here, and even though my brain was prodding me with what I'd already written about the PowerVR architecture it still seemed incredulous that these scores were achieved - a little mental hurdle is needed here: higher numbers (i.e. fillrates) don't necessarily mean better, its all about how its achieved!

In 32bit mode we can see that we are beginning to get a slight bandwidth limitation, however the worst-case scenario, at 1600x1200, shows the maximum penalty at about 18%.

FSAA performance on the other hand, shows a drop high on immediately, especially in 4X mode. With high fillrate cards such as Voodoo5 and GTS its not uncommon to see a 'stay of execution' in low res FSAA modes whereby we almost get it for free because the card is geometry limited; this does not appear the case with KYRO. KYRO already has a very low fillrate, and it would appear that even at low resolution its fillrate limitation is showing. As mentioned earlier, it is clear to see that the card is dropping back to non-FSAA rendering when the resolution exceeds 1024x768.

Quake 3 Arena Demo001

The settings for Quake3 were as follows (these apply to all Q3 demos used):

Texture Quality = Colour Depth
Lighting: Lightmap
Geometric Detail: High
Texture Detail: Max
Texture Filter: Bilinear
Texture Compression off

In Quake3 we can see that the card shrugs off Geometry (CPU) limitations of my system much sooner, and we begin to see a fillrate drop off even at 800x600. However, once again the card shows above 60FPS at 1024x768 in 16Bit, dropping off a little further at 32Bit. The 32bit performance table shows a slightly larger 32Bit bandwidth penalty than MDK2, going as high as 23%.

We can also see that the Pixel Fillrate graph pretty much plateaus at 1024x768 and beyond in 16 bit - this show the FPS is scaling uniformly down in relation to the extra fillrate demands of higher resolutions.

FSAA performance is similar to MDK2. Even at low res the performance is already dropping off, and the 4XFSAA score at 1024x768x16 is close to 75% performance degradation - given there are no extra bandwidth requirements for FSAA with KYRO this shows the pure pixel fillrate limitation