Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Review (Page 4/10)

Posted: June 22, 2001
Written by: Dustin Jones

Kyro II in Action

There are about 16 in-game shots of both the GeForce 2 and Kyro II, taken in Quake III and 3D Mark 2001 you can compare with, and draw your own conclusions as to which one you think looks better. Be warned, the 3D Mark 2001 shots do not to the Kyro II justice, as 3D Mark is built around Nvidia technology and takes advantages of the advanced features of GeForce cards more so than the Kyro II.

Download the images (1.3MB) to compare the Kyro II and GeForce 2

Caption: The Kyro II in action in Quake III and 3D Mark.

EMBM

The Kyro II has a wonderful feature called Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, or EMBM for short (pronounced Ehm-Bem). Very few gamer cards have the EMBM feature, only two that come to mind immediately actually; the Radeon and the Matrox G400 series of cards. I'm sure there are older cards that feature EMBM support too, but of the 'modern' cards, there are only three.

Environment Mapping is the procedure of mapping a texture, or in newer cards an 'inverted cube' of textures to an object. This new texture is overlaid on the old texture and effectively emulates a reflection effect without spending millions of precious CPU cycles raytracing a real relection.

Bump Mapping is a texture effect which uses a greyscale "heightmap" texture to create the appearance of bumpiness on an object. This leads to a massive increase in image quality, with the appearance of far more geometry than is actually present.

Environment Mapped Bump Mapping is, in turn, the application of an environment map to a bumpmap. The reflection will be distorted over the bumpmap, leading to an effect approaching the way reflections look in the real world outside your window. True hardware EMBM is generally more attractive than general-purpose bump mapping such as DotProduct3, but cannot be used as often, and thus is rarely seen in games. The Kyro II also supports DotProduct3 bump mapping on top of EMBM.

Here are three screenshot of the various supporting video cards (G400, Radeon, Kyro II) rendering EMBM in 3DMark 2000.

The Kyro II, Matrox G400, and ATI Radeon using EMBM.

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