VOGONS


PowerVR Fun Thread

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First post, by swaaye

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Well maybe some fun. Does anyone have any PowerVR cards? Series 2 or Kyro, or the oldies PCX 1/2? Report in with your experiences plz.

RG100?! 😁

I've thought about buying a card, but just can't will up the excitement. Testimonials from my fellow retro crazies are almost as much fun as playing with the hardware anyway!

Actually the first and only time I've ever seen PowerVR hardware in action first hand is with Dreamcast and I bought one of those early last year.... That is an impressive little machine.

Reply 1 of 1096, by bushwack

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I have 3 PCX 2 cards: a pair of VideoLogic Apocalypse 3Dx cards with driver CD and a bare Matrox M3D card.
Grab the driver CD here: VideoLogic Apocalypse 3Dx driver CD v.5

I've been looking for a Apocalypse 5D on ebay for at least 5 years now...nothing. 😒 I'm intested in the Kyro cards, just don't want to pay for them. 😀

Here is an ad I cut out of a June 1997 CGW magazine.

apocalypse3dx_magad01.jpg

Last edited by bushwack on 2010-11-16, 00:14. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 1096, by swaaye

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You just reactivated some brain cells. I remember looking at the Apocalyspe 5D back then. It pops into my head occasionally, during momentary retro bouts.

Apoc 5D was the PCX2 + Tseng ET6100, I believe.

Reply 4 of 1096, by retro games 100

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Unfortunately, I don't have any PowerVR cards. 🙁 I had a look on ebay, and found a 3D model -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=160396347819

There seems to be a lot of interest in it, judging by the Q&A section at the bottom. One Q comes from someone called Timber (I'm sure that name rings a bell - something to do with graphics cards or voodoo cards, or something), and he enquires about the 5D model.

Reply 6 of 1096, by Amigaz

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Waiting for this to arrive

http://www.tradera.com/Matrox-Power-VR-pci-auktion_105036200

We'll be able to have real PowerVR feast soon 😁

My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327

Reply 7 of 1096, by leileilol

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PCX-2 : You Will Hate This Card. Drivers for Win9x only, alpha blend only, and I think it's the card responsible for most 1998 games having to look like crap. Supports SGL which Unreal can do fine and a bunch of other exclusive games. No OpenGL support, that's just horrifically wrappered for Quake, Quake2 and Hexen2. I had a fan page in the works since its limitations and broken drivers lead to curiosities.
Game potential: Up to early 1999, I think Midtown Madness was the last game to have special support for this chipset.

Neon250 : Never tried it, it has PCX-2-ish drivers of similar compatibility. Supposed to have all the blend modes this time around though. Never had it, and was a flop so it was hard to obtain in the first place. Not a lot to write home about, don't buy into the lame delusional hype Dreamcast fans tell you about this 'great' PowerVR chipset (same chipset used in DC, but in card form and arrived way too late).
Game potential: Up to mid-2000, I THINK DirectX8 killed this one. I never seen any neon250 compatibility notes since then.

Kyro 2 : Probably the first 'normal' card that's up to scratch in basic TNT2-ish compatibility with OpenGL and Direct3D, a very VERY good card for retro gaming (16-bit dithering is a sight to see, very little graphics corruption, SDL friendly, and IIRC supports paletted textures). It HAS NO SGL SUPPORT AT ALL, so don't expect to play any of the old PowerVR exclusives on it, and the old minigl wrappers fail on it as well. It is also the only card with XP drivers and Linux drivers. One of the features it is hyped for is its 'hidden surface removal', which did jack squat to help the poor framerates and everything uses visplanes/lists/trees to avoid overdraw via software anyway.
Game potential: Up to late 2002-2003. By then hardware T&L was taking off, the Kyro2 couldn't do that and the popular thing to do was to SLOWLY EMULATE T&L via 3d Analyze! but this lead to many anomalies. Also it has hard freezes with UnrealEngine2 games. Well, at least the fillrate and texture units were good. Bloom and fullscreen framebuffer effects will slaughter framerate, so not very next-gen proof even if it ever had HW T&L or even pixel shading.

The drivers of all 3 cards aren't very optimized, they WILL DEMAND A GOOD FPU so don't do something stupid like put it in a Cyrix or a 486. A Pentium II 233 is the target system for this.

You can also use the PCX2 and the Kyro2 at the same time without a driver or hardware conflict. They won't WORK TOGETHER, but they can work, so you can do your feasting on the same machine. Windows 98SE *highly* recommended.

As for PowerVR... you know the iPhone? Yep, that's PowerVR all over the place. Mobile market is what they're playing dominatrix as now.

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Reply 8 of 1096, by Menkau_ra

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What did you mean by "old PowerVR exclusives"? Were there any games that worked only on PowerVR?
I always wanted to buy this card, even now days. Just wandering to test it 😀

Reply 9 of 1096, by swaaye

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leileilol wrote:

don't buy into the lame delusional hype Dreamcast fans tell you about this 'great' PowerVR chipset (same chipset used in DC, but in card form and arrived way too late).

Well compared to its predecessors, Dreamcast is mind blowing. 😁 480p, VGA out, >30fps in lots of games.... Compared to N64 and PS1 = hearty laughter.

There is a lot of info over on Beyond3D about the old PowerVR hardware. There is at least one PowerVR engineer that hangs out there. The Neon 250 (PowerVR 250) and the DC (PowerVR CLX) are similar, but the DC has a number of significant advantages.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=14 … eamcast+neon250

* CLX had a bigger tile size * CLX Had better support for palette textures * CLX Had some custom fading tricks that were […]
Show full quote

* CLX had a bigger tile size
* CLX Had better support for palette textures
* CLX Had some custom fading tricks that were often in arcade systems
* CLX acted as the memory controller for the DC
* PVR250 had VGA/2D engine and a PCI interface.

The PC components were always screwed from the start because they late and often lacked features. Kyro was the best obviously but it didn't have hardware T&L, a fatal flaw because that was super hyped at the time. It is unfortunate that the cards weren't more timely in their arrivals because the tech is fascinating. The tiled rendering is incredibly efficient, much better than the typical pixel pipeline designs of the time. Even with dramatically lower fillrate than GeForce 2, the Kyro could keep up pretty well.

Of course, when they bombed, the driver development went nowhere. No reason to funnel money into a lost cause.

Last edited by swaaye on 2010-01-22, 22:18. Edited 29 times in total.

Reply 10 of 1096, by exxe

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there are 3 Apocalyspe cards
the normal PowerVR
PowerVR + Tseng
PowerVR + Tseng + Sound

somewhere i have a picture......
edit found it
apoc5d.jpg

in my collection the only PowerVR card is a (Boxed) Matrox M3D

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Reply 11 of 1096, by swaaye

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Menkau_ra wrote:

What did you mean by "old PowerVR exclusives"? Were there any games that worked only on PowerVR?
I always wanted to buy this card, even now days. Just wandering to test it 😀

As you can see on the above boxes, games with support include:

-MechWarrior 2 PowerVR edition
-Tomb Raider
-Wipeout XL
-Ultimate Race Pro

And Unreal and UT have SGL support.

Not exclusives of course.... I'm not aware of any exclusives.

Reply 12 of 1096, by leileilol

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swaaye wrote:

And Unreal and UT have SGL support.

Only Unreal and Klingon Honor Guard are UE1 games that support SGL1 (PCX-2).

I should point out the additive effects in Unreal get blended with alpha instead, detail textures are dropped, and there are no stencil shadows (E3 '97 hype was wrong)

There are a few PCX-2 only games such as MoonRacer and Ultim@te Race (not pro).

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Reply 13 of 1096, by swaaye

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UT99 does have SGL files (SGLDrv.dll and SGLDrv.int). Are you saying that it doesn't support PCX-2? Is it Neon 250 only?

within UnrealTournament.ini

[SglDrv.SglRenderDevice]
Translucency=True
VolumetricLighting=False
ShinySurfaces=False
Coronas=True
HighDetailActors=False
ColorDepth=16
DetailTextures=False
FastUglyRefresh=False
TextureDetailBias=Near
VertexLighting=False

PowerVR SGL doesn't show up in the 3d hardware selection box, however.

Reply 14 of 1096, by leileilol

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It has them, but they're more like null stubs if anything. They don't function when you uncomment them. Same for the rest of the UE1.5 games.

UPDATE: They work with Kernelex, but UT regresses them to a point in a later version.

Last edited by leileilol on 2011-05-23, 08:22. Edited 1 time in total.

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