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 Xbit Labs 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.