Kyro III rising from the ashes?

WHEN POWERVR released first the Kyro and then the Kyro II designs in 2000 and 2001 the cards based on the design (mainly provided by Hercules) caught increasing amounts of interest, especially when the Kyro II demonstrated performance in the GeForce2 range while running much slower speeds. For a while, it looked as though the PowerVR / STMicro team might have the makings of a truly competitive product on their hands and, with the void left by 3dfx's passing, there was talk that they might emerge as the dark horse candidate in the 3D consumer market.

With Kyro II having made a reasonable splash in the market, the announcement of Kyro III caught the attention of the hardware industry and more than a few people looked forward to seeing what the card could do against ATI and NVIDIA's DX8 offerings when STM and PowerVR pulled the plug and decided not to bring the card to market after all. Since then we've not heard much from PowerVR, but if a story currently running at Beyond 3D is correct this may be about to change. Here.

The evidence is tenuous, but if it's true that PowerVR is working on a card design that would include support for Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 the dark horse of the 3D industry might have something fabulous hidden up their sleeve. If such a card even exists its not known if it would use a tile-based rendering system like Kyro II or a more traditional rendering scheme—certainly PowerVR's last stab at a tile-based renderer was impressive, but that was back when the GeForce2 had no memory-bandwidth conserving technology built in and frame rate gains were achieved in a nearly-linear fashion by pushing the memory clock on the video card.

Tenuous as the facts are in this situation, it'd be great if PowerVR did toss its hat back into the 3D market. Whether by coincidence or deliberate adoption, we saw both ATI and NVIDIA take major strides in their memory bandwidth conservation technologies after PowerVR had a hit in the Kyro II. Competition encourages innovation, innovation brings better products to market, and all of these trends are good for the industry and good for consumers. PowerVR isn't just a fly-by-night company, either—they aren't as large as many of the other players in the industry, but they've done some good work and built some good product—here's hoping it won't be too much longer before a third-generation Kyro (or whatever they choose to call it) hits the market. µ