ok, even more footage

Quake2 PowerVR (Higher quality!)
Quake III Arena PowerVR (Bring your vomit bag)

Any progress on getting Serious Sam to work with the PCX2?

No. Serious Sam fails on PowerVR MiniGL 1.0.2.1 and 1.0.6.0.

I think years ago, I 'altogl'd it to d3d using PowerVR's hal, so i'll have to try it again

Warcraft III Reign of Chaos brings a nice black screen in both D3D and OpenGL modes

Hmm, I always thought these cards were interesting due to the way they worked. Did contemplate buying one but there's no killer app for it...

Kyro is pretty unspectacular too imo, my 3D PROPHET 4000XT 64MB gets ridiculously hot and I've had some serious compatibility issues with it... Nothing really unique about the card, although that's probably my bias as I think any card newer than the GF256 isn't terribly interesting...

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?

Try it in another system if possible and see if it gives you the same problem. If it does then more than likely a component (or more) on the board has malfunctioned.

Is your host card an Nvidia card?

PowerVR PCX1/2 and Nvidia Geforce can't get along.

Try the included Tomb Raider demo with the card in pure DOS mode

That tomb raider gives me UVBELib uknown error.

No texture filtering sucks but they did a good job on noise reduction.

update: I broke the Tomb Raider with too many patches. Clean PowerVR demo freezes on the apocalypse just like 3d in Windows.

I AM TUROK!

There's no running from the funky way PCx2 handles transparencies.
But still pretty impressive, though it does support SGL out of the box. Even under the D3D renderer on modern graphics cards the fog/sky just doesn't look right - it seems only the Glide renderer does everything properly.

Considering it was developed for Glide early in its development it's no surprise.

There's an ATI dll too. I'm too afraid to try that on a Rage Pro, you know how they are with alphablends.

Already seen Tom's screenshots of it. Doesn't look that much better than if it were done with software rendering, no matter if you use the Rage Pro's renderer or the default D3D one.

I bought an Orchid righteous 3d back in Dec. 96. ($300 plus shipping, GAH!) It was the real beginning of the 3d paradigm shift. I remember the first time I fired up the tomb raider and glquake patches. Truly awesome. Because of that, I never tried the PowerVR stuff. Now however, I just bought a Matrox m3D off ebay. I've been playing tomb raider on my retro rig (P3 550, V3, AWE64) at 800x600 at mostly 30 FPS and it looks great. IIRC the Orchid could only do 640x480. Is the m3D more cpu scalable? Is that why it didn't do well back in the day?

Yeah the PCx2 allows for up to 1024x768 in 3D. It seems to scale better with faster CPUs, though its performance peaks out around that of a PII 266 or 300. Try the PCx2 with some games from after 1997 and you'll see why it died quickly. Plenty of screenshots (and videos) of those in this thread. Everyone at the time was just suffering from Voodoo fever.

retrofool wrote:

I bought an Orchid righteous 3d back in Dec. 96. ($300 plus shipping, GAH!) It was the real beginning of the 3d paradigm shift. I remember the first time I fired up the tomb raider and glquake patches. Truly awesome.

I had pretty much the same experience and I believe that goes for many here. For me it was the Creative 3D Blaster, mostly because that's what was available in my country (Media Markt which is a European Electronics chain).

The German PC magazines would review 3D cards from time to time and the summary was always that it wasn't ready. I'm sure they had a write up on the S3 Virge and similar products.

The 3DFX Voodoo however was the first product that all the magazines recommended buying. Back then these magazines where my main source of knowledge and I went with their recommendation. And yea, once I saw Tomb Raider with the glide patch, I knew I made the right choice 😁

The PCX2 is actually supposed to be quite scalable, however the PCI bus transfering of the images to the host video card is the big bottleneck.

The card will work fine on modern CPUs provided you run Windows 9X and no Geforce card with it.

So I was poking around ebay today and a Neon 250 decided to show up. Problem is, the bid is now at $125, thus I don't think it'd be worth it for anyone (unless they're a real die-hard PVR junkie).

Would be neat to own but yah that money is a bit much.

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

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

So I was poking around ebay today and a Neon 250 decided to show up. Problem is, the bid is now at $125, thus I don't think it'd be worth it for anyone (unless they're a real die-hard PVR junkie).

I saw it, too. Too rich for me.