The host video card shouldn't matter much except it should at least be 1mb, support 640x480x16 and not be an nVidia card. The PCI bus speed really matters since most of the bottleneck is at the buffer transfer to the host video card.

There's a little tool called 3dcc that would choose which card to use for hte Direct3D HAL. OpenGL would need a few DLLs shuffled into the game folders akin to early 3dfx MiniGL support. Indications of the PowerVR MiniGL being in use is a brief PowerVR EXTREME logo fading at the top right, dithering, and stuff not blending right 😀

Thanks for the info! I'll be using a late socket 370 board, so I'm guessing PCI should be as fast as it gets. I'll probably pair it with a Matrox G100, just for the combined blending nightmare!

I knew about 3Dcc, but I haven't found it to be too reliable especially when using 3Dfx cards. Might give it another go or maybe Powerstrip might help me out here.
As far as MiniGLs go, did PowerVR cards have their own? If so, I can see how this could work, it just hooks to the card's API or whatever.

Again, many thanks for the info!

PowerVR had several MiniGL DLLs released as "gl patches" for a few Quake-based games.

For the newer GL games or other GL games there's a different MiniGL that Techland wrote for Crime Cities which doesn't approximate blending like PowerVR's does, but does seem a bit more robust.

IIRC, they also had driver plugins for Unreal Engine games.

Yes, I've known about the Techland MiniGLs for a while, which is so weird to me that a relatively unknown company would go through all this trouble. Why not create their game in D3D instead? Not that I'm complaining, since we did get these MiniGLs in the end that are super useful 😀.

My favorite, or should I say least favorite video card to pair a PCX2 card with is a Packard Bell onboard Cirrus Logic graphics chip, because the goddamn bios thinks the PCX2 is a standalone video card and disables the onboard graphics on every reboot.

I have mine paired with a Radeon 9100 card in a high performance Socket A system.

It's not CPU limited. 😀