Videologic Vivid!XS
John Gillooly
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Sep 1, 2001 12:00 AM
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Syslink |
RRP: $350 (time of review)
Whilst lacking hardware T&L, the Vivid!XS manages a great combination of price and performance.
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The KYRO II chipset differs significantly from the other solutions on the market. It uses a technology known as tile-based rendering to achieve peak performance, rather then the brute force solutions employed by competing chips.
The KYRO II chipset differs significantly from the other solutions on the market. It uses a technology known as tile-based rendering to achieve peak performance, rather then the brute force solutions employed by competing chips. These traditional rendering methods involve the rendering and texturing of the scene internally, and then the cards Z-Buffer removes hidden pixels before a scene is drawn on screen. This is a wasteful approach to rendering, and necessitates high speed DDR RAM that has driven the price of premium cards into orbit.
In a tile-based renderer the order in which this is done changes radically. Before texturing, the scene is broken into smaller segments, or tiles, and the Z-Buffer works out which polygons in these tiles are visible. Only the visible polygons are then textured, reducing the workload and keeping the core and memory speed of the card low, which in turn keeps the price down.
The other advantages of the KYRO II are that it employs a technology called Internal True Colour, rendering the scene in 32-bit colour, and then subsampling down to 16-bit, meaning the performance difference between the two colour depths is insignificant.
The chipset also supports Dot3 and Environmental bump mapping, but unlike the RADEON and GeForce series of cards, the KYRO II does not possess a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine. This is due to complexities in tile-based rendering and is a situation that should be remedied with the KYRO III chipset.
Videologics Vivid!XS is one of the first KYRO II cards on the market, sporting 32MB of 128-bit SDRAM running at 200MHz and a core speed of 175MHz. The Vivid!XS also sports a S-Video TV-Out port.
Using the standard 3DMark2000 Pro test at 1,024 x 768 resolution and 16-bit colour, the card scored 4,197 3DMarks. The same test at 32-bit colour scored 4,128 3DMarks. This really shows that there is no reason to not run the card at 32-bit colour depth.
In Quake III the card managed 34.8 frames per second at 1,024 x 768 high quality and an admirable 15.1 frames per second at 1,600 x 1,200. The difference between 16-bit and 32-bit colour is again negligible.
This performance is at the level of a GeForce2 GTS which isnt bad. There have been reports of visual artefacts in some games, mainly as a side effect of the tile-based rendering technique. The lack of hardware T&L is the major downside to the card, but the price/performance and visual quality make up for this. With the Vivid!XS, Videologic has managed to deliver a fantastic video card at a very competitive price giving the likes of NVIDIAs GeForce family a run for their money.