We'll cover some of the more important features here, for those that want to sound intelligent at the next LAN party. Tile Rendering - Memory bottlenecks are the main obstacle with today's video cards. This is partly due to the fact that much of the available memory bandwidth is wasted rendering and texturing pixels that are not even visible on the screen. This method of 3D rendering has been with us since the early 60's, and was used in early wire frame CAD drawing and flight simulators. Each polygon is rendered and textured in the order it is sent to the video card, and as a result, the card has no idea which polygons are visible and which are not.
Every last pixel is rendered, regardless of it's relative position to the viewer.
Notice in the diagram below how the pixels are textured and shaded, and only then is a depth test performed. This hidden surface removal is all done on chip, which results in less time wasted accessing external memory. The Kyro II performs the depth tests prior to texturing the pixels. But that's not all this thing does on-chip. As you will see in the performance testing, the hit from switching to 32-bit color is almost nothing, thanks to Internal True Color.