The chip specs
The Kyro II chip's specifications are an inversely gaudy display of hardware efficiency, an orgy of austerity—from the low transistor counts to the cheapo memory to, well, everything else. It starts with the chip itself, which amounts to just a small section of a GeForce3 chip, transistor-wise.

At 15 million transistors, the Kyro II is barely even there. It's half the size of a Radeon, and under a third the transistor count of a GeForce3 chip. The pipeline specs are similarly puny...

In terms of nominal fill rate, the Kyro 2 is seriously wimpy. These numbers are almost entirely theoretical, but the Kyro's peak texel fill rate is half that of its nearest competitor, and a quarter that of a GeForce2.

However, the Kyro II has the ability to deliver eight-layer multitexturing in a single rendering pass thanks to its tile buffer. (The GeForce3 uses a similar trick to deliver four layers per pass.) Adding extra texture layers in this way takes clock cycles, but avoids the big performance penalty that would come with additional rendering passes. By contrast, a GeForce2 would have to render a scene four times in order to lay down eight textures per pixel. Most current games don't apply nearly that many textures, but even at four textures, the Kyro II is—wait for it—much more efficient.

As for memory bandwidth...

The Kyro II matches the GeForce2 MX (and the MX 400, which isn't on the chart) in memory bandwidth, but trails well behind the more common DDR solutions. The chip's low-rent spec means the Kyro II will have to be madly efficient just to keep pace with the competition.