GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 Part II: CPU Scaling

ST Micro’s Kyro II

The Kyro II isn’t a GPU in the same sense that the rest of these solutions have hardware T&L engines, but there’s no point in changing the name of the roundup just to suit it.  Because of the lack of a hardware T&L engine the Kyro II is a bit more dependent on a fast CPU since the host CPU’s role extends much further than passing vertex data onto the graphics processor.  As the CPU is much more involved in the geometry processing stages a slower processor could limit the GPU at very low clock speeds; finding out approximately what clock speeds those are is what these charts should help us do.

The Kyro II isn’t a fill-rate monster by any definition of the word, its performance is acceptable primarily because of its differed rendering technology.  Here you can see that it doesn’t take too powerful of a CPU to drive the Kyro II to its limits, after the 1.13GHz mark the performance curve begins to flatten out.

By moving to Medium Detail settings we shift bottlenecks away from the Kyro II and thus we see a much steeper CPU scaling curve.  The Kyro II curve is reminiscent of the GeForce2 curves we saw earlier but keep in mind that you have to be higher up on this curve in order to remain competitive with the performance of a GeForce2 because these tests don’t take into account physics and AI calculations which a Kyro II system has less CPU power to dedicate to.