daz said:
The Kyro series of graphics cards, and in particular the Kyro II were low price high performance efforts - the Kyro II able to match the GeForce 2 GTS. They took a slightly different approach to the rendering process, and this was the reason they were so good at the time.
Unfortunately, not having hardware T+L on the cards really hampered them as time went on...
So what are PowerVR doing now?
Ahh yes, the Kryo cards.
The subject of much debate on these here forums, and you have pointed out the reason why, they didnt compete with the GTS in anything other than certain highly selective benchmarks, one of which was a specially written benchmark specifically for kryo cards which owners touted as proof how great the cards were.
The different approach was that it only rendered that which would be visable on screen at the time, where as at the time, cards were rendering everything such as objects behind walls in line the users line of sight etc etc.
Those that bought them were quite adamant they were fantastic, but the rest of the world could see they were inferior in every single way to almost every other card on the market at the time.
They wouldnt work with some games without hours and hours of hacking of drivers, general performance wasnt that great, missing textures, huge areas of unrendered graphics in others.
I remember at the time quite a large thread on these forums started by a guy who would spend his time doing NOTHING but hacking the kryo drivers to get them to work with games, every couple of days he would come back with a list of things to add in, take out, change, etc etc, listing what you had to do to get even the popular games of the time to run.
although not nearly as bad as the Kyro's I might add ...oh how far ATI's drivers have come. 
