Looking at the m3d poster i thought "dont remember terracide supporting powervr"
so did a search and found this press release

"SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 27 /PRNewswire/ -- NEC Electronics Inc. and VideoLogic today announced `Flying Nightmares 2,' `Team Apache' and `Terracide' from Eidos Interactive are the latest games to join the PowerVR Ready Program. The titles will be available Summer 1997. The PowerVR versions of these titles offer superior game play, combining a vivid, real- time 3D environment that gives an unprecedented sense of reality."

So I installed it and apparently it does
cant test though as my pc doesnt have a pvr card

hardcore 4x4 does have pvr support

Terracide used Direct3D, the shortcuts of specific versions are just adjustments to suit the cards (similar to Resident Evil and Moto Racer)

Flying Nightmares 2 was cancelled a long time ago. Only a self-running boring demo of it exists.

Revolt looks beautiful... 😳

Turok 2 looks okay, some shadow sorting problems

Metal Fatigue is the last game to support SGL (as late as 2000), and looks and runs great on it. Crap game though.

Turok 2. One of those super overrated games 😁. The N64 people went nuts for that game but I have to say: yikes, not much fun. Was one of the prettier games on the N64 though.

I've played Revolt on Dreamcast. Apparently it likes the console's PowerVR chip a whole lot more! Maybe the game actually requires the Neon 250?

The Neon250 hadn't come out yet when Revolt was released on the PC (and neither was the Dreamcast version either). It's a Direct3D game.

The depth in Turok 2 is screwed, sometimes things can pop OUT of cutscene letterboxes such as lensflares, legs and even boobs

Here's a nice 1024x768 screenshot of the PCX2 running Nightmare Creatures in SGL. You can easily see the evidence of a 4444 texture format on alpha blended mist here, along with inprecise, blocky filtering on that. Similarily, most Dreamcast games got away with a ton of 4444 too.

Midtown Madness 2 is also another late game to support the PCX2, partially. Large textures slow down and screw up the cache however (guide arrow switches textures), and menu text doesn't show up ingame. Direct3D 7 game, additives are swapped for alphas.

leileilol wrote:

Similarily, most Dreamcast games got away with a ton of 4444 too.

Yup. I've seen banding in some games on it. There's a Tomb Raider port jobber, one of the not-so-hot WinCE games, that has some horrible color banding in a few spots.

Gamecube has a nasty color depth limitation too. I'd say it's "not as bad" but frankly I'm not so sure about that. Resident Evil 4 shows it the worst perhaps.

I've noticed something. All the SGLDrv.dlls i've seen since Klingon Honor Guard are all the same size! Epic never updated their SGLDrv to work with newer Unreal cores and such. They're not Neon250-tailored, either. It's just a regression issue with the engine, pointlessly included with the games that don't support it anyway.

how does revolt look running under d3d ?
does it still have the same problems

how it should look

Just discovered Hardwar supports powervr

I tried to play Hardwar years ago and tried to like it, but it seemed so lifeless. Couldn't get into the economy model when it seemed I was the only one on the planet.

Another PowerVR magazine ad, this 2 pager is from the chip maker itself. I pulled this from a CGW July 1997 issue.

Mechwarrior 3 in 1997!? I first known about its existence along mid-1998. It might still actually support the PCX-2, alphablend is all over the place in that game.

Weeeeeee! Another 2 page ad, this one's from CGW issue June 1997.

swaaye wrote:

http://www.segatech.com/technical/gpu/powervr_logo.gif […]
Show full quote

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 just got an unexpected freebie from an ebay seller. 😀 It's a Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT graphics card, based on the Kyro chipset. A review of it can be found here -

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-104-1.htm

However, I haven't tested it yet. Is it worth giving it a go?

Sure, but don't try it on AGP 4x/8x boards. It won't work

I got it working - I installed it in an Epox KT133A board, which has got a mobile barton (@ 600 mhz) CPU in it. I used the Hercules driver found here -

http://ts.hercules.com/eng/index.php?pg=view_ … 51&pid=35&cid=1

On that webpage, there's also a link to the PowerVR drivers. I downloaded the latest PowerVR win9x driver, and installed them for test 6 below. Here's some 3DMark 99 Max benchmarks (tests 5 and 6), with other graphics cards for comparision (tests 1 - 4).

1) "Cheap" Radeon 7500 - 4570 3DMarks
2) "Proper" Radeon 7500 - 4959 3DMarks
3) Cheap GeForce4 MX440 - 6329 3DMarks
4) Radeon 8500 - 5624 3DMarks
5) Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT (using the Hercules driver) - 6560 3DMarks
6) Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT (using the latest PowerVR driver) - 6492 3DMarks

For tests 5 and 6, I set the V-sync to Off inside the impressive Hercules/PowerVR display control panel. Unfortunately, for the first 4 tests above, the V-sync setting may have been On, I just can't remember. Sorry. Also found in both sets of drivers' control panels, there is an overclocking facility! (I haven't tried this yet.)

I fired up Unreal, which OFFICIALLY supports the PCX2, via SGLdrv (since the initial release). This is how it looks.

- Forced small texture, even when texture detail is set to high
- Vertex lighting looks a LOT better than lightmap
- 20-30fpsish
- No detail texturing
- All additives and modulates are now alpha blended (yes, even the water ripple in Nyleve's Falls is now alpha blended, and shows the black portion of the ripple only)
- Volumetric Lighting doesn't really work even if you can enable it in the preferences
- Coronas fade out funny
- Can't go 24-bit even when the option is available.
- No way to enable stencil shadowing which was showed off at E3 '97

Well it probably still looks better than software rendering right?

Unreal was a sort of final proving grounds for all of the 3D accelerators that were around at the time. So many of them sucked at various features or simply didn't support them. D3D games were very lenient (and basic) at the time and would just work around unsupported features, but Unreal really filtered out the shitty chips because they didn't have a chance of running the game.

I remember the Rendition V2200 people being very testy when they found that their treasured GPU wasn't even getting a shot at Rredline Unreal. Rendition's D3D driver is terrible and useless for the game. For that matter their OpenGL is just as barely functional.

I wouldn't give Unreal that much credit. It was built from the ground up to be a Glide engine. Everything about it was Glide-centric. Epic subcontracted out the work to make Unreal engine drivers for the other 3D APIs, and then that ended up biting them in the ass so they scrambled to develop a workable Direct3D driver in-house. I remember trying patch after patch while they incrementally made the game behave better on my nVidia TNT little by little. I eventually ran out of patience and didn't come back to Unreal until around 2002-3 when it was old.

I imagine that Glide was their choice because when they started development it was the only API that they were comfortable with. OpenGL was really only used for GLQuake, and that was after Unreal started development and it only really worked for 3dfx anyway. D3D was pathetic in 1995-7. PowerVR wasn't even remotely as popular (or as fast/capable) as Voodoo.

A lot of house cleaning happened in 1998 though. Unreal Engine and Quake 2 / Half Life really showed which 3D cards were junk.

actually Unreal's software mode is quite good if you have a cpu to back it up...