Tim Sweeney goes to Kyro
Unreal programmer lays into tile based rendering
Tim Sweeney, the brains behind the various incarnations of the Unreal game engine, has never been a fan of tile-based rendering, once calling "the whole concept .. terribly misguided". But with Videologic's new Kyro II graphics chip showing surprisingly good performance at a budget price using this technique, perhaps he has changed his mind? Apparently not...
"These tile renderers [have] always run great with the older games, then had the compatibility and performance problems with newer games as they started coming out", according to the Sweeney. "I'm really sure that any game you buy 18 months from now will run acceptably well on a GeForce2 MX, but I have big doubts about that with Kyro II."
He also has doubts about the wisdom of buying a card today that doesn't include hardware T&L support. "Games are just beginning to come out now, which makes it a particularly bad time to spend $150 on a non-T&L graphics card. That's the flaw in using 1999 games to benchmark a 2001 graphics card : it ignores the larger issue of whether the card will be appropriate in the 18 to 24 months between a typical gamer buying the card, and when he buys his next 3D card."
Hopefully we should know soon whether there's any justification to his fears, or whether it's simply a case of "once bitten, twice shy" following problems with the first two generations of Videologic's PowerVR technology.