The State of 3D "The NP2 is supposed to be the latest and greatest that Imagination Technologies will be offering. It is again based on the PowerVR architecture, and holds much in common with the Kyro in terms of rendering. It most likely will add pixel shaders to the mix though, and increase the texture size to 2048x2048 (the Kyro only supports textures up to 1024x1024 pixels). Instead of the two rendering pipelines that the Kyro has (and uses very well) the NP2 will feature 4 rendering pipelines. The speed of this chip is estimated to be 300 MHz! When you add the tile based rendering, the four pixel pipelines, and the clock speed of the product, it is not going to be filrate limited! Since overdraw is such a huge performance hit for traditional renderers, the PowerVR architecture (tile based, deferred rendering) makes overdraw a non-issue. On paper it seems that the NP2 has a filrate of 1200 Mpps, but with an average overdraw factor of 3.6 for a scene, the performance of this card in terms of bandwidth and filrate would be over 4000 Mpps! This will also be the first PVR chip that uses an onboard T&L unit, so it is nearly up to spec with the next generation products from other manufacturers. It is unknown at this time if the architecture will be as "programmable" as others coming out (such as the NV-20 and the Radeon II). Programmable meaning programmable pixel and vertex shaders, as well as a programmable T&L unit. There are also many other added functions that makes the architecture much more compatible with current applications (as the PVR architecture has historically had some problems in the compatibility department when it comes to rendering functions, and at times many scenes were not rendered properly). This looks to be their best product as of yet, and will be very capable and competitive with what the rest of the marketplace is showing."