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PowerVR Fun Thread

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Reply 240 of 1096, by Pippy P. Poopypants

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Putas wrote:

It is Timber's auction, many eyes on that one. And price of his Obsidian...

I just realized that he's the person who owns the now-defunct tga3dx.com collection site. heh heh, all makes sense now. If he has account here he should post more often. 😜

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Reply 241 of 1096, by sliderider

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I remember not long ago somebody on ebay UK had a rare S3 Savage XP proto. The Savage XP was supposed to be a fixed version of the Savage 2000 with higher clocks, more memory and T&L that worked. It took way to long to come to market and probably wouldn't have been much better than an original GeForce or GeForce 2 at best and by then the GF3 was already established as the performance leader and the first GF4's were just starting to trickle onto the market. I think it might have been the same seller. Not sure what that card ultimately went for, but the starting price wasn't low at all. I think it was something like 200 pounds to start.

Reply 242 of 1096, by Pippy P. Poopypants

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It was originally intended to compete with the GeForce4 MX cards, although its actual performance is down around that of a GF2 MX. The hardware T&L was never actually enabled (of course, the only drivers that ever existed for this card are very raw). Regardless, VIA (S3) by that time had been cornered to the low-end of the market. The only other people who I know of that have gotten their hands on a sample and tested it, is iXBT (unless Tim got it from them).

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Reply 247 of 1096, by leileilol

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Believe it or not there are full games that are actually designed to be short. Japan's full of them and this is especially true for 'arcade games', such as PureVex

And now for some BAD captures

Soldier of Fortune 2
Carmageddon 2

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Reply 248 of 1096, by leileilol

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Half-Life

Tried to show off the whole tram ride and resonance cascade - I also do a couple of weird things like rescue a vortigaunt, get some elevator crash sci to say 'hello' before dying, and saving a falling scientist

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Reply 249 of 1096, by Pippy P. Poopypants

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Hahaha, wow, still hitting it in the face eh. Lighting in HL looks kind of like in Unreal. Definitely faster than most of the OEM graphics cards put into those vanilla boxes in those days for sure though.

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Reply 251 of 1096, by Putas

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I am benchmarking my PCX-1 now and looking at the influence of primary cards in GLQuake. It can be quite big. I found Kyro, Millenium, Virge GX2, Riva 128 and Trident 9750 being fast group, SiS 6326 average. Slowest are Verite 2200 and Trident 9880 scoring 20 % lower. I hoped it would be proportional to 2d speeds but Trident is confusing me.

I got even higher differences in d3d. Some of the cards seems to give up at resolutions lower then 640 and PCX does not scale with them. Many games are suspiciously slow with Riva or Millenium even at 640x480. I found the Virge to be the best primary card across all games and modes, sometimes even doubling fps of others.

Reply 252 of 1096, by swaaye

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I wonder what the Virge has that the other cards don't. Maybe the others have some bus transfer bottleneck? Although I admit I have no idea how the PowerVR card moves data into the primary video card and what functions it may use to do it.

Reply 253 of 1096, by leileilol

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If you're benchmarking GLQuake, don't forget to enable 24-bit mode, and throw in -bpp 32 into the parameters for GLQuake. It's faster that way.

PCX should be at least twice faster in the 320 modes... UT ran very smooth for me at that res 😀 (on a p4 of course)

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Reply 254 of 1096, by Putas

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leileilol wrote:

If you're benchmarking GLQuake, don't forget to enable 24-bit mode, and throw in -bpp 32 into the parameters for GLQuake. It's faster that way.

For me 32bpp speed is same as 24, few percent slower then 16.

leileilol wrote:

PCX should be at least twice faster in the 320 modes... UT ran very smooth for me at that res 😀 (on a p4 of course)

In direct3d or SGL? Mine with last patch cannot do either.

Reply 255 of 1096, by leileilol

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Putas wrote:
leileilol wrote:

If you're benchmarking GLQuake, don't forget to enable 24-bit mode, and throw in -bpp 32 into the parameters for GLQuake. It's faster that way.

For me 32bpp speed is same as 24, few percent slower then 16.

32bpp on PCX should be faster because of the lack of dithering (PCX is processed in 24/32bpp no matter what) and the less translation of data passed throughout the PCI bus since the PCI bus is also 32-bit

At least for me, PCX-2 is faster in 32bpp in every case i've tried

Putas wrote:
leileilol wrote:

PCX should be at least twice faster in the 320 modes... UT ran very smooth for me at that res 😀 (on a p4 of course)

In direct3d or SGL? Mine with last patch cannot do either.

Here's what you do:

1. Open SGLDrv.dll in a Hex editor
2. Jump to offset 85345 (0x14d61), or find "appPow"
3. Change YAMMM into YANNN
4. save
5. Edit SGLDrv.int, uncomment every line, save
6. Install KernelEx (I usually do it with the extensions disabled by default)
7. After rebooting etc. run UT in Windows98SE Compatibility mode
8. Attempt to change the renderer to the PowerVR SGL for Windows driver

it should work! Some other UE1.5 based games with a SGLDrv should work too, at least without the first 4 steps (don't know why UT had to do that)

UT has one big problem though - the light intensity offset is shifted much brighter. I wish this could be fixed, it didn't have this problem in the UT demo (skip the first 4 steps for UT demo's SGL to work)

I don't know why the heck KernelEx is required to get it working. but it does.

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Reply 256 of 1096, by Putas

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Dithering does not have to slow it down and it is not like PCX is sending pixels to primary card in single words, whole tile is dumped and lower resolution means less PCI traffic. Not all stages of PCX pipeline are true color. There is no 32 bit output from PCX anyway.

Now I moved to PCX2 and if my numbers are correct it is lot less dramatic difference. Might have something to do with image composition on chip. I found out one requirement for primary card, it must have a Direct Draw driver, so some of those functions should be used.

I need Unreal not UT, my bad.

Reply 257 of 1096, by leileilol

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An interesting comment appeared.

Back then I added q3 support to miniGL via wrapper (ArrayElement() and blend mode remapping IIRC). Some levels could even be played at 60fps on my P233MMX and PCX2.

If you're interested, I can try to find it in my old archives.

If this guy digs it out, i'm gonna throw all my idt3 stuff at it. Q3, EF, FAKK2, Alice, CoD, JK2, SOF2, MOHAA, EF2, OA, everything I can.

And since Doom III's source is out it might even be possible to try it on that (after thorough renderer hacking), even using its stencil buffer for shadowing.

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Reply 259 of 1096, by retro games 100

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Putas wrote:

I got two pcx1 cards all the way from china. I/O data board works fine, but apocalypse 3d seems broken. It installs but launching anything 3d freezes the pc. The chip barely heathens up compared to the working board. No sign of damage, is it dead?

Did you ever fix this problem? I'm experiencing the same issue: the Apocalypse 3D card installs OK, but launching anything 3D freezes the PC. I just started a post about this problem, here, but perhaps I should have detailed the problem in this thread instead. Oh well, no harm done I hope.

Edit: Solved, the details of which can be found in my other topic, mentioned directly above; (link here). Thanks.

Last edited by retro games 100 on 2012-01-12, 22:20. Edited 1 time in total.