ITC and 8 Layer

8-layer Multitexturing

Multi-texturing is the use of applying multiple textures on any rendered object. This isn't a radically new concept, merely a more advanced version of existing technologies. This new capability allows for eight different textures to be lain upon one another. Meaning, a rendered door can now have its wood grain, the light reflected off of it, and a host of other texture related modifications. Take a look at the picture from the Kyro white paper and you will see what we mean.

The way the Kyro board renders these textures is also slightly different; this is because of the tile-based rendering method. Conventional methods would have to perform a multi-pass rendering scheme. They would have to re-render the original scene multiple times in order to finish processing all the textures. The Kyro, on the other hand, stores the previously rendered scene and passes it back up the pipeline to be modified with the appropriate texture.

Internal True Color

This card is choc full of surprises. The third of the big ones, Internal True Color, probably impacts image quality the most. Companies like ATI claim that their 32-bit rendering is performed at minimal loss. From the results we've witnessed with the Radeon, that claim is certainly true. So what does the Kyro have? They spent their lives making sure that you couldn't care less about having 16-bit or 32-bit color. Their internal engine is pumping at a full 32-bits all the time.

Conventional cards pass over an image many times before it is presented to you. They process texture after texture, each end stop essentially becomes a new start. Kind of like recording one sound, and then copying it to another tape to add more to it. In the case of the video card, it is processing at 32-bit all the time, but dithered down to 16-bit if you have the video card set to 16-bit. Now if we think about that for a second, every time we convert from 32-bit to 16-bit we lose some quality. Now imagine that happening numerous times as more and more textures are added (multitexturing). The quality loss adds up over time.

Once again tile-based rendering rears its huge head, the Kyro ever being the guy out in the middle of nowhere. This PowerVR card performs all the texturing and blending operations at 32-bit before reducing the image down to 16-bit. Thereby minimizing the amount of image quality loss when multiple textures are involved.