You have it exactly right. It was a short-lived 3D accelerator chip. The only mass-market card I know of that used it was the Matrox m3D. (I had one.) It was the first 3D accelerator that could do 24-bit (or 32-bit) color, but it was slower than a same-timeframe Voodoo 2. It also had *VERY* little developer support (and only got DirectX support in Windows VERY late.) There were a few later generations of chip, including the one that the Sega Dreamcast used, but they never got anywhere near as popular as Voodoo, Radeon, and nVidia chips. The STMicro KYRO series cards were probably the biggest-name cards of the later generations.

Note that the company PowerVR still exists, and makes 3D circuitry that is in many mobile device chips (for example the iPhone and iPad use PowerVR-core GPUs.)

There's a huge PowerVR thread on here with all sorts of interesting chat, info and screenshots.

Awsome, I'll check the thread out. Are powervr cards rare/expensive?

Anonymous Freak wrote:

You have it exactly right. It was a short-lived 3D accelerator chip. The only mass-market card I know of that used it was the Matrox m3D. (I had one.) It was the first 3D accelerator that could do 24-bit (or 32-bit) color, but it was slower than a same-timeframe Voodoo 2. It also had *VERY* little developer support (and only got DirectX support in Windows VERY late.)

PowerVR generally had better visuals than the contemporary cards, especially since it could run 24 bit higher at almost no performance loss. It had issues with Direct3D games, unless they were tweaked for the card (PowerVR Ready games). Saying it only got DirectX support very late is wrong, it had DirectX 3 support from the start in 1996. Developer support with it's proprietary API, PowerSGL was better than the other non-Glide/Direct3D API's. Just look at this list with all the supported games. There are three card series that supported the PowerSGL API, PCX1, PCX2 and the Neon250. The PCX2 (Matrox M3D, Apocalypse 3Dx) are the most common, while PCX1 (Apocalypse 3D) and Neon250 are pretty rare today.

Why do people want a PowerVR card? Some games have ports which look better than the 3DFX/Direct3D counterparts. Examples are Mechwarrior 2, Virtual On, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil.

They show up on Ebay from time to time, but they are a bit rare nowadays. Since the main cards do not have a VGA output connector I think many people so no use in saving it and threw it away in the early 2000's. Alucard86 here on vogons just paid 40 euro for his card. I haven't seen one go below 30 dollars for quite some time on Ebay. Expect 25-40 euros on Ebay for a Matrox M3D or Apocalypse 3Dx. PCX1 and Neon250 even more than that.

Anonymous Freak wrote:

The only mass-market card I know of that used it was the Matrox m3D.

Videologic also released the 3D Apocalypse and 5D Apocalypse cards.

The main drawback of the PCX1-2 is that it does not have blending functions besides alpha blend. It does not even have alphatest. Neon250 solves that issue in SGL2
also while PCX2 does support 24-bit color, there are many video drivers that try to disable the use of it and force 16-bit color instead (although dithered down from a 24-bit source)

PowerVR always uses deferred tile based rendering, they were the only PC vendor who made it into market availability. Thus for techies their appeal may be based in this major deviation from casual 3d renderers.

Anonymous Freak wrote:

It was the first 3D accelerator that could do 24-bit (or 32-bit) color

Certainly not, I doubt even PCX1 could claim the primacy.

vetz wrote:

PowerVR generally had better visuals than the contemporary cards, especially since it could run 24 bit higher at almost no performance loss.

Questionable. They led the screen resolution race, but color precision was not a big issue back in the day. Their hacky texture filter and limited raster ops however...