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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on August 2, 2001
Manufacturer: Videologic Product:
Vivid!XS
 The
Kyro 2 is the latest in PowerVR’s Series 3 Graphics Cards
& will be the most successful for the PC so far, or so
the Manufacturers of these cards are hoping at least. In the
past PowerVR were probably most well known for their
relationship with Sega, e.g. powering Sega Arcade machines
& the ill-fated Dreamcast.
Perhaps
one reason for the some of the in interest in this Chipset
was the infamous leaked nVidia presentation (Or “sales
tool” as they called it) on the Kyro 2, available
here, which cast nVidia in an undesired light & cast
the Kyro 2 as being the valiant underdog. Thanks to Videologic/Imagination Technologies David
Harold for answering some Questions regarding the Kyro 2.
Given the costs of this card I was expecting very little, if
anything, in the way of bundled software with the Vivid! XS,
perhaps a few Technology demos, nothing more. I was
pleasantly surprised to find that it came bundled with
WinDVD 2000 2.2, along with the Driver CD for the Graphics
card itself of course.
The Manual was a fairly standard issue containing how to install
the Vivid! XS along with some more on TV-Out &
resolution/refresh rates. Nothing too special here really.
The Driver installation also allows you to install an Online
Manual as well. The Help files for the Vivid! XS were nice
though & explain all the settings rather well.
Installation
Installation of the Videologic Vivid! XS went
rather smoothly as one could expect. I uninstalled 3dfx
Tools, shut down my system & removed the Voodoo 5
5500AGP. Then I gently slid the Vivid! XS into the empty AGP
slot. After screwing the card into place & plugging in
the Monitor cable I booted up the system up once again. The
card was detected via Plug & Play & the latest
Drivers were installed without issue.
Hardware Features
The Vivid! XS has a few extra hardware features built into it that
make it a nicer overall package. They are as follows:
Motion Compensation
DVD playback on the PC has become rather popular, what with DVD
drives being fairly standard in new systems along with
Multi-Channel Soundcards/PC Speaker systems & AC3/DTS
Decoders.
In most instances very little changes between each frame of DVD
(MPEG2) during playback. Using predictive coding it is
possible to calculate/measure the motion of moving objects
between frames. This data can then be used to predict their
position in future frames.
This process will, as you can guess, reduce the CPU resources
needed for DVD/MPEG2 playback (In supported Software
Decoders that is). Although, given the speed of current
CPU’s is it really all that necessary? To test this
out I tried PowerDVD 3.0 & WinDVD to see what difference
Motion Compensation could make (It's worth noting that
Motion Compensation is only 1 form of On-board MPEG2
decoding, the other being iDCT - Inverse
Discrete Cosine Transformation, as
supported by most ATI Graphics cards in addition to Motion
Compensation).
The Kyro 2 Chipset supports & uses DXVA (DirectX
Video Acceleration) for providing Motion
Compensation so assuming your Software DVD decoder supports
this then Motion Compensation with the Vivid! XS should work
just fine.
The tables beneath display the CPU & Memory utilization with
Motion Compensation Enabled/Disabled. For
testing this I used Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon playing
10 minutes of the film on System 1. First up Power DVD 3:
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Power DVD 3.0
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On
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Off
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Now for WinDVD 2000 2.2:
| WinDVD 2000 2.2
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On
|
Off
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The results for CPU/Memory usage weren’t exactly
overwhelming (To put it mildly) & in fact it seems the
main benefit I noticed was that of reduced slightly reduced
Memory usage with Motion compensation enabled (1 or
2MB only though). Testing DVD playback while playing a high
quality MP3 back resulted in similar results, albeit it with
higher CPU usage in both results.
Overall it seems Motion Compensation had no real beneficial
effect on CPU usage in the tests taken in Windows 2000,
although memory usage was slightly reduced. Perhaps on a
slower CPU can the reduced CPU usage be seen, although for
newer system it would seem that Motion Compensation has no
noticeable effect.
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