Kyro2 had less than a year before it became very limiting for games. Sure it has a neat architecture, but it was never a good choice. There's a giant PowerVR thread on the forum here with discussion of their stuff.

PowerVR is currently dominating phones and tablets if you want to spend a lot of time with one of their GPUs again. Tablets and phones with performance similar to a Dreamcast. SGX has DirectX 9 level features but they aren't really fast enough for that stuff.

I'm surprised there's mention of S3 MeTaL working on Savage2000 with UT. i never got it working on savage2000 ever.

MeTaL works on Savage4 though, i know that. It doesn't look very different from Direct3D infact.

I got it working (see my little Savage 2000 thread). You need a special Metal update.

It's not very exciting though. It runs well enough but I realized detail textures are disabled by default and if you turn them on performance tanks. Glide and a Voodoo are way way bettererer.

Savage 4 is a good card to have from a collectible standpoint. I think it was the first card to have tri-linear filtering and they all adopted it eventually. .

It has supposed "single cycle" trilinear, but it was not the first to offer trilinear. I am not sure which card first let you use trilinear filtering because nobody cared about it in games early on.

I'm pretty sure Intergraph cards had trilinear support... in 1994.

I know that SGI used trilinear in their RealityEngine. That was also the early '90s.

SGI also implemented it in N64 because the goal there was to have hardware with the same features as RealityEngine but much lower cost and all in one chip.

swaaye wrote:

I know that SGI used trilinear in their RealityEngine. That was also the early '90s.

SGI also implemented it in N64 because the goal there was to have hardware with the same features as RealityEngine but much lower cost and all in one chip.

SGI was a professional machine, though. So were the Intergraphs for that matter. A gamer most likely would not have one of these machines in the home. Savage was a consumer level card so from a practical standpoint it would have been the card that brought trilinear filtering to the gaming masses.

But, like I said, N64 does trilinear filtering. N64 is really pretty neat in its image quality. It also does edge AA in most games and has a dedicated mini geometry engine (RSP). It was supposed to be a budget RealityEngine and it certainly was a big step up from PS1 and Saturn.

Voodoo2, Rage Pro and Riva TNT can do trilinear as well. The thing is not many mid '90s games had the option to enable trilinear. Obvious exceptions are the Quake games which you can enable "linear mipmap linear" filtering (trilinear).

Some old games don't even do mip mapping (or do it per poly instead of per pixel) so there's not much point to trilinear. 😁

In another almost related news, I just recieved Virge MX card. While it does not work with that quake library, it can play Unreal. Well, without transparencies and fog, but it seems to be one last ViRGE architecture udpate I was not aware of. Oh boy am I bussy benchmarking. Shocking 1000 3dmarks 99.

I wonder if that is faster than a Trio 3D or Virge GX2?

Putas wrote:

In another almost related news, I just recieved Virge MX card. While it does not work with that quake library, it can play Unreal. Well, without transparencies and fog, but it seems to be one last ViRGE architecture udpate I was not aware of. Oh boy am I bussy benchmarking. Shocking 1000 3dmarks 99.

Are you sure that it's a Virge MX and not a Savage MX? I can't find any reference to a Virge MX anywhere but Savage MX was a laptop video chip. It's possible someone may have put it on a desktop video card, though, as there are Savage IX video cards out there and IX is also supposed to be a laptop GPU. If your Virge MX is a mobile variant mounted on a card, I wouldn't expect it to perform as well as a desktop card because mobile variants usually don't

I got carried away. It is performing clock for clock exactly as GX2, the chips looks the same, all the difference was made by newer driver from Compaq. Maybe it can be modded to support GX2. I have yet to run many games to see if the driver improved something besides Unreal and cheat in 3dmark (flat shaded game 2 ftw, at least it does not freeze for 20 minutes like others). Max overclock is also almost the same as GX2, but still barely heats up. Default 83 MHz, what a waste of 6ns SGRAM.

My guess about glquake and Quake II is that noshutdown just ran them with OpenGL, and since the ViRGE drivers don't contain OpenGL support he got software rendered OpenGL.

So these numbers would be quite meaningless, only as a cpu benchmark.

GXL750 wrote:

I give credit to that card because it tries so damn hard to impress but, unfortunately, it was born in a time in which the GeForce already existed. As much as I love the GeForce 256 DDR, it almost seems nVidia was just being unfair to the competition.

Yeah the whole Dreamcast deal set PowerVR back by a year and a half. Neon250, or PowerVR SG as it was called, was supposed to come out in 1998 to compete with the TNT. The Kyro could've came earlier!

leileilol wrote:

The Kyro could've came earlier!

Not according to my book. Neon 250 was delayed by NEC's manufacturing capacity, not R&D.

How does this card (4mb diamond stealth 3000) perform in general as I haven't had much time and the energy to test it my self lately?

nforce4max wrote:

How does this card (4mb diamond stealth 3000) perform in general as I haven't had much time and the energy to test it my self lately?

I can't remember who's site this is (Putas?) but it is an amazing Virge benchmark effort.
http://vintage3d.org/virge.php

swaaye wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

How does this card (4mb diamond stealth 3000) perform in general as I haven't had much time and the energy to test it my self lately?

I can't remember who's site this is (Putas?) but it is an amazing Virge benchmark effort.
http://vintage3d.org/virge.php

Yes, that's Putas's site.

A note on the "missing texture" comments on the first page:
Using default windows98SE drivers (from the install disc), I've seen similar problems with Rage and ViRGE cards missing textures.
Testing Tomb Raider 2, any textures that can't fit in video RAM seem to be dropped entirely on the 2 MB Stealth 2D 2000 and 4 MB Rage II+ I have. So, at low resolutions, all the textures are present, but more and more get dropped as you up the resolution, color depth, and/or enable z-buffering (all eat up RAM).

I'm assuming this is purely a driver issue (not supporting DMA texture updates), since I've seen TR2 work without the missing texture problems on other Rage II and Virge systems.

On another note, I noticed the visual quality of the ViRGE was noticeably better than the Rage II or RIVA 128, with no visible polygon seaming and smoother/cleaner texture filtering, plus better perspective correction than the Rage II. (especially noticeable in truecolor and at low resolutions -where seaming is more obvious)
There also didn't seem to be truecolor 3D support on the Riva, and the Rage seems to be the only 1 of these 3 to allow dither to be disabled in 16-bit color mode. (at the expense of color banding, of course)

There were certainly other bugs with the ViRGE though, including problems displaying the life bar and occasional black strips appearing mid-screen. (though not as bad as in the TR2 ViRGE clip in the video thread)

idspispopd wrote:

My guess about glquake and Quake II is that noshutdown just ran them with OpenGL, and since the ViRGE drivers don't contain OpenGL support he got software rendered OpenGL.

So these numbers would be quite meaningless, only as a cpu benchmark.

there is third party opengl wrapper for virge, as already mentioned above.