In the past, I have always reserved using Unreal Tournament as a benchmark for motherboard or processor reviews because of how much it utilizes the system platform rather than the video system. However, since the KYRO is so durastically different from previous video cards that I've tested, I had to included UT into the benchmarking bunch to see how it matches up against the others.

Of course, to help me get better results from Unreal Tournament, I had to use a different benchmarking demo than I had used before. The demo that I had been using in the past was called "wicked400" and it was designed to test the system platform performance rather than video performance. To help me better test video performance, I chose to use the demo "Thunder," which claims to scale much better than "wicked400" as the resolutions are cranked up.

The results above show that the KYRO is not up to par with the results obtained from the GeForce2 MX and GTS cards. Both the NVIDIA cards obtained higher frame rates at the lower resolutions, even at 32-bit resolution where the KYRO got oh-so close to the GeForce2 MX score, but just didn't have the oomph to put it ahead. As we move up into the higher resolutions, we see that the GeForce2 MX finally runs out of steam and so, gives the Evil KYRO a chance to overtake it at resolutions of 1024x768 and above @ 32-bit color.

Here's where it once again becomes very interesting. The first thing that we notice is that the results remain steady in the lower resolutions because of how processor/memory-intensive the Unreal engine is. Secondly, it seems that, contrary to what we witnessed with our high-end system, the results at the lower resolutions ended up in favour of the Evil KYRO for the very first time. This leads me to believe that either NVIDIA's Detonator drivers are not quite optimized for AMD platforms as they are for Intel platforms or that the KYRO's reference drivers are more-so tuned for AMD platforms. Seeing that the drivers had difficulty in running the card stably on our Intel platform, which is very wierd in itself, I will have to edge with the latter reason that the KYRO's drivers are better-tuned for AMD platforms--something that is rarely seen as it is often the other way around.

It's also very interesting when looking at the higher resolutions. At 1024x768 @ 32-bit, the GeForce2 GTS actually moves ahead of the 32-bit-power-rendering-house Evil KYRO, but then seems to die off again at the next 32-bit resolution "up," 1280x1024 @ 32-bit. This example shows how the tile-based rendering method of the KYRO is finally paying off as its sleek elegance out-performs the GeForce2 GTS's raw power.

On to: VillageMark Results