Another guy we got to spend some time chatting with was Joe Kreiner, Developer Relations Manager for the Kyro at STMicroelectronics. He was there with people from Hercules and Imagination Technologies.

Joe Kreiner of STMicroelectronics by the Kyro II booth. Overheard at the booth was a comment about how you could afford to buy three Kyro II boards for every GeForce3 board and why would you want to buy a GeForce3 board at that price when it would be out of date in six months. These game developers have no mercy, and rolling credit.

STMicroelectronics really does hope to be a player in the graphics game. They've tried with varying degrees of success in the past, and now, they're hoping that the very complexity that DirectX is pushing in games will turn out to be exactly where the PowerVR architecture finds its advantage.

Mr. Kreiner said, "Talking to high-end game developers like Epic and Valve, they're looking at larger numbers of polygons per frame. Depth complexity is going up. For instance, Quake III's depth complexity is 3.3, which means that for every one pixel drawn 3.3 get chopped, and in the future that figure will probably be 4 or 5 and our advantage actually gets larger."

Well, PowerVR's architectural advantages and its arguments to that effect have remained consistent for the last five years. The reality is that PowerVR will probably have to look at incorporating programmable shader functions, probably in the form of a Vertex Shader of some form, in order to remain competitive. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions right now because, putting a front-end Vertex Shader, or T&L engine, isn't necessarily a slam dunk for PowerVR. If the graphics industry is moving more towards "exposing" its hardware, the advantages of PowerVR have to be sold to developers in a way that shows that the offbeat architecture does deliver value add.

That means either the best performance, which is unlikely considering the focus of the product on lower price bands, or great sales. However, I have a feeling that Kyro is going to be a retail product, with some exposure through Taiwanese OEM board vendors for some time to come. That means STMicro have to be in for the long haul. Favorable buzz among enthusiasts for the Kyro II hasn't necessarily translated into stellar sales for STMicro.

However, if the PowerVR architecture can keep delivering simple price/performance advantages, STMicroelectronics can continue to mine the $90-149 retail board price range, and with a few strong OEM wins, stay in the race.