From what I understood, GeForce cards aren't that cooperative with PowerVR cards.
So perhaps you could try with a non-NVidia card and see if that improves the situation? I only have experience with Matrox, S3 and ATi cards myself, in combination with a PCX2, and they didn't have a problem. Mind you, the fastest PC I ever tried the card in is a PII 350 MHz I believe.
But I have no reason to believe that the CPU speed will be a problem.

Scali wrote:

From what I understood, GeForce cards aren't that cooperative with PowerVR cards.
So perhaps you could try with a non-NVidia card and see if that improves the situation? I only have experience with Matrox, S3 and ATi cards myself, in combination with a PCX2, and they didn't have a problem. Mind you, the fastest PC I ever tried the card in is a PII 350 MHz I believe.
But I have no reason to believe that the CPU speed will be a problem.

I'm pretty sure you're right regarding speed. I have a Matrox m3D in an Athlon TBird 1200 rig, paired with a Radeon 8500LE. No issues.

SquallStrife wrote:

Currently have a GeForce 4 Ti

here's your problem

FYI my successful PCX2 combinations have been ATI cards (Rage and Radeon), Matrox cards, 3dfx cards, S3 cards (Trio and Savage), Trident cards, and the nVidia RIVA 128 (probably the only nv card to work).

The PCX2 shouldn't care whether you got a laptop video chipset, onboard video, a crappy PCI M919 486 or an AGP8X Pentium 4. It just hates the nvidia cards beyond NV3

SquallStrife wrote:

So is it a speed thing? Or is the PCX2 picky about what it's installed beside? Currently have a GeForce 4 Ti, a pair of V2's, a Vortex 2, and a NIC.

I've tried a few of the different drivers from the driver package vetz uploaded, is there a "best" driver to use?

Not a speed thing, it's the Geforce causing the issue. PowerSGL games should work fine though, but no Direct3D with the PowerVR card.

I personally prefer the 4.1.2c1 release that is modded by PowerVR Revolution.

Had a bunch of trouble sorting out a similarly fully loaded out system, even without a GeForce in the picture. Finding the right PCI slot takes a little bit of thought, as it doesn't much like sharing. And one of the things I think helped was disabling the Vortex 2's DOS driver.

Yes, the reason why the 2D card matters is because the PowerVR driver communicates with the 2D card via DirectDraw. It opens a DirectDraw surface in the video memory of the 2D card, and transfers the 3D image over the PCI bus (hence no need for a piggyback VGA cable). This also made it possible to render in windowed mode.
But some 2D display drivers don't quite cooperate wtih the PowerVR driver that way.

I have to disagree with the consensus here...

I've used a PCX2 with a Geforce FX 5700LE coupled with various driver iterations, and it was perfectly stable on both an Intel 815 system as well as an Ali Aladdin K6-2 system (Win98SE).

The problems to me seems to be an unstable system.

Also, you might try early DirectX versions and see which ones work best. For example, Motoracer didn't work at all for me with anything past DirectX 8 IIRC.

Remember people, you are using 15+ year old hardware... It is essential that the capacitors be assessed for their functionality. For example, an Asus motherboard from 1999 with Rubycon YXG or Sanyo WX capacitors should be OK to use without issue. I've found the YXG series to be excellent in the sense that they stand up well to time. But PSUs from that era almost always used off-brand or low-quality Taiwanese capacitors.

Another thing to consider is the 2D adapter. Some manufacturers used quality caps, and some used junk. Asus was hit and miss.

After you rule out the hardware, then start looking at driver incompatibilities.

I had a bit more of a muck around before I went to bed, and the advice here seems to have been spot on.

Swapped out the GeForce 4Ti for an ATi Rage IIc, and now it works flawlessly.

The trouble now is that I have nothing faster than the Rage in an ATi card, other than a Radeon 9800XT, which is probably extreme overkill for a Tualatin system.

So now I'm considering going down to a Slot-1 build. I have an Intel SE440BX-2, so I'm thinking maybe a P3 500 would be appropriate for a Rage IIc + PCX2 + Voodoo2 setup?

Thoughts?

SquallStrife wrote:

The trouble now is that I have nothing faster than the Rage in an ATi card, other than a Radeon 9800XT, which is probably extreme overkill for a Tualatin system.

I don't think it's overkill at all. Lots of late P3 and early P4 systems I'm sure got a similar video card upgrade.

It especially won't be overkill when the PCX2's bus bottleneck is useful to keep some speed finicky games playable on such a fast (or even faster) system 😀

gdjacobs wrote:

SquallStrife wrote:

The trouble now is that I have nothing faster than the Rage in an ATi card, other than a Radeon 9800XT, which is probably extreme overkill for a Tualatin system.

I don't think it's overkill at all. Lots of late P3 and early P4 systems I'm sure got a similar video card upgrade.

Really? When I bought the 9800XT, it was for a then-brand-new Barton Athlon 2800+.

I bought a 9800pro as the final upgrade to my P3S-1266 back then 😀 (from Geforce 3 Ti 200)
It was funny to see Doom 3 have the same frame rate from 640x480 to 1280x960 😁
Needless to say, I gained quite a bit moving to the 3400+ 2.4GHz newcastle after that.

Got it working in the end. The Radeon 9800XT had some stability issues, so for now it's a gimped 1.4GHz Tualatin with a Rage IIc, PowerVR PCX2, and SLI Voodoo2.

Every slot filled, baby!

A Rage IIc is probably a bit anemic for a 1.4 Tualatin, right? Though it does add ATi CIF support.

The 9800XT is actually faulty, I tried it in another system and it freezes, glitches, crashes and carries on. Pity.

So I'm on the lookout for a new ATi card for the P3 system. What's a good pick?

Another R300 is always good. 😀

Or maybe you could go a little lower - Radeon 8500 - for that TruForm(tm) novelty that 3* games use!

*-IIRC: RTCW, JK2, SamSE, maybe more