The Kyro II has had a lot of hype, but why? looking at the stats of this card it doesn't look all that impressive does it. 2X AGP is not the greatest a 270Mhz RAMDAC is prehistoric by today's standards. However it does have one very important thing up its sleeve that gives it an edge over other cards in its category. That is the TBR or Tile Based Rendering. TBR gives image quality a boost as well as performance. Maybe that though isn't really the ACE up the sleeve here, the real one that has many people wanting this card is the hidden surface removal. This little art can tell whether or not a surface needs to be rendered before the card try's to draw it. this saves a lot of time and allows the card to seem a lot quicker. This also saves on memory bandwidth which has plagued the likes of Nvidia with its high end cards. 

The Kyro II supports FSAA up to 4X to add to its growing list of features. The Kyro II does very well at hiding its given graphical power behind its very modest stats but still its a force to be reckoned with.

This card (or even its chipset) is aimed at the Geforce 2 MX and Radeon SDR market which really underestimates its power as in certain circumstances it beats the Geforce 2 GTS at very high resolutions.

Chip features

• 175 MHz chip clock rate

• 175 MHz memory clock rate (synchronous with chip clock rate)

• Tile Based Rendering (TBR), but no T&L

• 0.18 micron processing technology

• Memory interface for SDR SDRAM

• Expandable by 64 Mbytes maximum

• Memory bus width 128 bits

• RAMDAC 270 MHz

• Interface AGP 2X

• 4X full-scene Anti-Aliasing available

• Motion compensation for DVD/MPEG-2

It may have a modest speed but it performs surprisingly well. The card is best suited to 32-bit colour and high resolution gaming as that's when the games require the most memory bandwidth. At this level of gaming this card becomes the best value card around. Stats are not impressive even by budget standards but the technology it uses certainly is. A major competitor in the budget graphics world now, beating the likes of the Geforce 2 MX and the Radeon SDR in most of today's benchmarks. In high resolution 32-bit colour it can beat the likes of the Geforce 2 GTS and the Radeon DDR. 

Great value good speed great price, will be selling thousands of cards I believe.   

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