question 1: the Kyro chip supports the programmable shaders of dx8 ? does any in-stores card? question 2: should i buy such a card (e.g. 3d prophet 4000 xt) for my pentiumII 400 with 192 megs? or is it unuseful? (now i have a banshee) question 3: if the answer to 2 is ''NO'' what do you recommend? thanks, bye. Michele.

1. No, Kyro doesn''t support shaders.
(It doesn''t even support TnL)
GeForce3 does.

2. It depends : are you sure you need the shaders ?
If you''re asking, you probably don''t need them.
And a GeForce3 is Very ! expensive
A Kyro based card would probably do just fine.

If you search around the web, you should find tons of reviews
of GfxCards. It should help you to make up your mind.

Has anybody here got some experience with vertex shaders ?
( Ease of use, interesting results, ... )

3. It depends. What do you intend to do with it ?

i''m surprised it hasn''t TnL in hardware: some reviews i''ve read say that is faster than GeForce MX... it has TnL, or not?

what chipsets implement programmable shaders?
what chipsets implement TnL in hw?

my purpose is gaming (racing / flight sims) and programming with DX8.

Nope, the Kyro definitely doesn''t have TnL.
But yes, it''s a very fast chip, with a bizarre memory architecture, allowing it to perform faster than some TnL hardware.

The only chipset I know of that implements programmable shaders is the GeForce3. ( ATI should be working on it).

Both Radeon and GeForce chips implement TnL.

IMHO, any current card should be enough for flight sims or racing games. There are no extra features that are ''must-have'' for gaming or programming. (programmable shaders certainly aren''t if you''re not a professionnal).
I would probably go with a GeForce2 MX, and save some money for later to upgrade the CPU.

In Fact, I''ve got a PII-450, dropped my Voodoo2+ATI, and got myself a Geforce DDR early last year. (yeap, first generation of GeForce). Plans are to change CPU+Motherboard early Next Year, and keep the ''old'' GeForce.

In fact i''m not a pro, but i''m gonna be.. i hope.

Hey, the geforce mx ddr costs 50% more than the kyro I, and is slower (on a 600 mhz pIII) I don''t really know if it''s better to take advantage of hw T&L of go for the Kyro and save some bucks.

Anyway, thanks everybody.

bye!