Most people don't realise it but the PowerVR chip inside the Dreamcast is quite different from that of the PowerVR Series2 (Neon) for the PC. In fact the one the Dreamcast uses is almost exactly the same as Video Logics third PowerVR generation, the Kyro. This is because the Kyro only renders what you can see and this couldn't be done by PVR2, but could be by the Dreamcast.

Kyro has also become the third card after the G400 and ATI Radeon to support Environmental Bump Mapping, a feature that gives depth to textures. Along with that it also support Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) for smoother edges and what's more it does them almost as fast as the GeForce2 and Voodoo cards, but for a fraction of the cost. How does £99 sound?

Ok fair enough, it's no Geforce2 GTS, Radeon or Voodoo5500/6000 beater, but it can easily wipe the floor with the lower end cards from those groups. Almost all of which are at least £50 more expensive and by comparison you also get the additional features.

Well targeted

Until we actually went and spoke to a tired out guy behind the scenes @ ECTS's VideoLogic booth, we didn't really believe the Kyro could cut the mustard. We even got an exclusive look at an as yet unnamed game from Massive Entertainment (Ground Control); sadly it was too dark to get any real video.

Either way the PR chap did a good job of convincing us that Kyro could do some pretty impressive stuff, not least because it could scale to future games without any real performance hit. The unique way it only renders what you see means that the normally high polygon count of modern games remains fairly small for the Kyro, thus allowing it to be much faster.

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