mwdmeyer wrote on 2022-06-05, 05:17:

I did a video comparing the PCX1 and PCX2 which might interest you guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FetxUywyGf8

Do we know if PC 3D Engine runs at 60 MHz? I always wondered if there is a crystal beneath the heatsink.

I have a PCX1 as well, but the heatsink is soldered to the board, and I've never gone through the trouble to remove it.

Yes I believe there is a crystal under the heatsink.

Today I tried two Kyro II cards on overclocked 440BX's AGP slots.
Hercules' doesn't show anything at 124MHz
Powercolor's shows artifacts at 129MHz. 124MHz are fine.
These frequencies are FSB ones with 1:1 AGP frequency on a NMC 6BEX board.
Both tested in 3DMark 2001SE and Final Reality 5x. Not sure if doing long benchmarks is useful in this case. I know it is when overclocking chips but I don't know if it is with stock chip clocks but overclocked ports.
Question : can I damage a card with an overclocked AGP slot ? Voltage is untouched.
Powercolor's version is rather rare, I don't want to kill it.
Thanks.

Made a small PowerVR Machine (PowerVR PCX2 based) from a MSI Desktop base.
It includes a 810 based motherboard, a Matrox M3D, 256MB 133MHz and a 1GHz Coppermine. Pimped with a PowerVR sticker and a slot-in Pioneer DVD reader. It's running cool and silent with WinME.
For now it's running with a SATA controller (SI 3512) on a 2.5" disk but I might migrate on a CF card. The freed PCI slot might be used either for a better primary card to be paired with a PowerVR (Tseng ET6000 or ATi Rage LT Pro PCI) or an exhaust PCI fan below the M3D card.
Onscreen : One of Videologic Apocalypse SGL Screensavers.

Nice case badge.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-07-10, 23:41:

Nice case badge.

Thanks.
And thank you for your help about overclocking. This one uses my untouched M3D rev. B and I'll put the overclocked Videologic one (when it's done) in a well cooled tower. Still unsure about if it will be an AT or ATX though.

It gets extremely hot when overclocked. So be very generous with the cooling. Some kind of airflow is highly recommended.

Even at stock clocks i can barely touch it. I'll make sure it's cooled properly.

Guys I'm about to make benchmarks again with different primary cards.
Tests will include Dethkarz, Quake II, Half Life and Unreal. Considering Nascar Heat.
How do I turn off v-sync for HL ?

Can you please share the background ? Thx!

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-07-25, 20:51:

Can you please share the background ? Thx!

here

Hi guys,

I made new tests to compare performance and compatibility with different primary cards.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p3G-l … dit?usp=sharing
I wanted to test more cards but my CPU left this world unfortunately (100% my fault, was testing overclocking by overvolting it to 1.7V).
I think the quantity and diversity of games tested allows us to evaluate compatibility in addition to speed.
I need older drivers for Rage 128 cards. I didn't have these D3D issues with older ones from my ATi CD but I broke it (yes, it was not a very good week). Maybe I still have it on one of my HDDs though.
The other workaround I should try for these D3D issues is using an old "non-revolution" PowerVR driver. Deactivating optimizations on Revolution drivers makes it very slow but maybe stock drivers are more compatible and show better results in these cases.

PowerVR turned the big 30 a few days ago and they're sharing some more early nuggets of PowerVR prehistory to celebrate on the Imgtec twitter, showing early ISA-based PowerVR hardware, as well as cake-based PowerVR hardware.

I trying to find any PowerVR2 (SGL2.DLL) Games, only sdk demos is founded, while i try i found this articles:

https://itnan.ru/post.php?c=2&p=258976
https://sudonull.com/post/49819-Forward-to-th … he-Power-We-Are
https://www.old-games.ru/articles/67842.html
https://habr.com/ru/post/381895/

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PowerSGL Direct . If anyone remembers this, it was relevant for early PowerVR chips, because:
…
Infinite planes effects were not part of Open APIs and full capabilities of PowerVR can be exploited only through proprietary SGL. The API also supported data instancing to save memory by avoiding duplicates of materials, transformations and objects.
… vintage3d.org/
pcx1.php

With the release of KYRO, it clearly lost its relevance, most likely because the notorious Infinite planes did not take root, and the implementation of data instancing had appeared in OGL and/or D3D by that time.

And yet, the SGL2.dll file is present in the firewood (and it is finished with each version!). Judging by the tags in the file, this is PowerSGL Direct 2 (who thinks they can handle the difference: SDK for the first). But, since all the PowerSGL games I know are looking for the SGL.dll file , it would be logical to pour it and move away , rename it and see what happens. On the example of Unreal (version with SGL support):

I even honestly tried to slip SGL.dll into games(and accompanying file) from firewood for PowerVR Series 2 - approximately the same result. It turns out that PowerSGL Direct was thrown out after all, but why finish PowerSGL Direct 2 then ? Be that as it may, if you want to play beautiful Tomb Raider , buy PCX2 ...

c

This means PowerVR KYRO and probably later can support PowerSGL2 API, please try someone who has that video card and confirm its really it?

Try to run PowerSGL2 sdk demos -> PowerVR Neon250 (tech demos) (SGL2 only)

You can also try to run SGL games with compatibility layer -> http://vogonsdrivers.com/wrappers/files/PowerSGL/SGL2/

No

The only SGL2 that the Kyro can do is only in conjunction with its own OpenGL ICD internally. There is no alleged SGL2 API support. There are no SGL2 games. and no, mixing in old Neon250 dlls won't get SGL to work.

If you're thinking about getting a KYRO for SGL games - don't.

i have PCX2 for SGL games.
But i hope SGL2 API is supported in some way or another in other cards than Neon250
for example Looking for somebody with Kyro/Kyro 2 or Neon 250 and willing to help in small test
Tuxality confirmed "Kyro still supports SGL2 API and is very close to Neon250"

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-09-05, 05:27:

But i hope SGL2 API is supported in some way or another in other cards than Neon250
for example Looking for somebody with Kyro/Kyro 2 or Neon 250 and willing to help in small test
Tuxality confirmed "Kyro still supports SGL2 API and is very close to Neon250"

First please quote my full sentence, it starts with "It seems", that ain't confirmation for my taste ... 😉

As for the SGL2 on Kyro, it exists, does somewhat work, yes it is true that it is mostly used for OpenGL ICD internal purposes as leileilol stated yet it does work for two of the SGL2 demos as well as it does comply with the SGL2 API header that I was using for my SGL compatibility layer attempt (sans one struct that I needed to RE).

The main difference between SGL2 support on Neon250 and Kyro/Kyro II is that some functions were no longer exposed in the later one such as sgl2_mt_tstrips while some new one were added such as sgl2_get_intermediate_map_info. Function was obsoleted in favor of SGL2 extensions, in this case SGLEX_PVR250_MULTI_TEXTURE (0x00010020) with same prototype it seems so.

On Kyro Fortune demo does not start due to the missing function which I believe can be hacked/wrapped to support missing functions with use of SGL2 extensions as mentioned above, Marble and Scanner demo crash at startup while Knot and Trilinear demos does start and run although it seems that geometry is wrong in case of the last demo. In the attachment you can find screenshots from the demos executed on Kyro II.

Regarding SGL compatibility layer, as explained in that particular thread I've encountered issue related to the rendering being suddenly aborted when working on a proof-of-concept. After REing and wasting time in general I've come up what was causing the issue, it was the DirectDraw surface Lock/Unlock pair during rendering. In a nutshell, SGL when initialized in address mode expects user to provide surface pointer as well as stride obtained from calling the IDirectDrawSurface::Lock and IDirectDrawSurface::Unlock methods, so before final render the PROC_2D_CALLBACK is called and in the user callback Lock/Unlock is used to retrieve surface information in order to let PowerVR know where to blit rendered scene. So what is the issue? Well, Kyro / Kyro II during such does abort rendering, even if sgl2_is_render_complete is performed or any sleep added. I've disassembled mentioned SGL2 demos and indeed, SGL2Shell implementation does only call Lock/Unlock once in the entire application lifespan as compared to the SGLShell implementation as well as to what the SGL games do, most likely this is a known driver bug and/or limitation that the ImgTec developers might be aware of or it can be an intended SGL2 behavior while having context created - not sure as I do not have any intel regarding that. So, in order to fix this I needed to hack DirectDraw to cache surface information and prevent calling Lock/Unlock more than once, this also applied to the GetDC / ReleaseDC from the surface if I remember correctly. Such hack allowed SGL-based Virtual On to work in its full glory on Kyro SGL2 implementation. However, this is too hacky for my taste especially that on Win9x you cannot do simple IAT patching which complicates this a little as replacement DDRAW.DLL needs to be renamed to other library as well as binary hexedited to accommodate chages - due to that project was abandoned (the SGL wrapper is in development, it is the poc that is no longer). It is not worth time, IMO.

sorry i been not attentive, living in stress always =(. Hope all this ends soon

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-09-06, 18:32:

sorry i been not attentive, living in stress always =(. Hope all this ends soon

Hey, you did nothing wrong! I'm sorry to hear that, I hope everything will clear up for you soon, if I sounded offensively in any way sorry for that, I never meant anything wrong. 😉