What games are suitable for a Permedia 2 card in a P-MMX 166 system with 32MB of ram, for now i just tested Resident Evil 2 and it works great!, any other games?
Quake2. The game was primarily developed on Permedia hardware, since it was the only one with a proper OpenGL ICD at the time (1997). Several of the early Quake2 screenshots were taken on a Permedia card.
Quake III Arena has some Permedia 2 fallbacks in the renderer code, try that as well
wrote:Quake2. The game was primarily developed on Permedia hardware, since it was the only one with a proper OpenGL ICD at the time (1997). Several of the early Quake2 screenshots were taken on a Permedia card.
Quake III Arena has some Permedia 2 fallbacks in the renderer code, try that as well
no!!!!! quake2 on permedia2 lacks color and looks pale.
i guess permedia2 is not capable of multi-layered texturing. most 3d games uses two layers: one for lighting(brightness) and one for colors. and permedia2 seem to be always missing one of them: no colors in quake2, and no bright/dark difference in quake3 and 3dmark!
the permedia2 is overall slow aswell, on par with rendition2200(which has far better image quality), but only less than half of riva128 and g200.
btw - Permedia 2 captures are in the stickied 3D Accelerator thread.
wrote:Quake2. The game was primarily developed on Permedia hardware, since it was the only one with a proper OpenGL ICD at the time (1997). Several of the early Quake2 screenshots were taken on a Permedia card.
Quake III Arena has some Permedia 2 fallbacks in the renderer code, try that as well
I tested Quake II right now and works good but quite slow, also Resident Evil 1 works flawlessly
[off topic - more on this guys website:
Back when I was programming CAD/CAM in the 90's I was running a PIII 350 with a Permedia 2 card. Besides MasterCam, it didn't to too shabby of a job calculating games like Quake2 and Carmageddon, playable for work anyway. 😀 Then it died, and was replaced with a craptastic SIS 6326. No more gaming at work.... Till I dropped some Voodoo loviin' in there. 😁
wrote:It's better for gaming than most other workstation cards of the time.
I like reading about the kind of SGI box you need to run Quake well. Not exactly in the same price range as Voodoo1. ( link) 😁
Yep. The MaxIMPACT boardset itself would have cost many, many times the price of a PC that you could play Quake on at the time it was released. However, it could do things that were just not possible on the PC at the time (dozens of lighting sources, 48bit colour, stereo imaging etc).
I picked up one a couple of years ago for my Indigo2 - it's a giant; multiple, full-length cards that are all interconnected. It gives out a colossal amount of heat, too. In fact the heat is a common issue with causing card failures - often the texture ram module will overheat and the chips will seperate from the pcb!
My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net
might be of interest
professional opengl is different form gaming
Ultimate Race PRO annihilates this card. I don't understand this, it's able to put out a playable 20fps in Unreal and 16 in Quake 3 but below 10 in URP?
Lithtech games like Blood 2 and Shogo also had support for this card, I don't know how playable they were though.
wrote:Ultimate Race PRO annihilates this card. I don't understand this, it's able to put out a playable 20fps in Unreal and 16 in Quake 3 but below 10 in URP?
Lithtech games like Blood 2 and Shogo also had support for this card, I don't know how playable they were though.
The drivers may have been optimized for certain games. Unreal and Quake were popular benchmark programs back then, so optimizing for them would make the Permedia look better in magazine reviews. This was all back when people still trusted benchmarks to be reliable indicators of performance but after the card makers started getting caught cheating the benchmarks, a lot of people lost faith in them and started using real world gaming performance across a wide variety of games as the real test of video card power because it was less likely to be cheated.
There is no Shogo result because Permedia 2 refuses to texture maps. Maybe I should exclude Unreal result too, because it looks like crap, flat shaded and so was Quake 3.
wrote:There is no Shogo result because Permedia 2 refuses to texture maps. Maybe I should exclude Unreal result too, because it looks like crap, flat shaded and so was Quake 3.
Aha, so these are your benchmarks! That's good, makes them more trustworthy!
Why doesn't the Permedia 2 do texturemapping on Shogo? Is it a bug on the drivers or the game? Have you tried the latest patch? The readme states that the card can't do Lightmapping.
- Permedia2
Works well, although no lightmapping.
Recommended Display Settings:
-LOW or MEDIUM (lightmapping will automatically
be turned off on this card)
-Turning on Shadows or Model FullBrights may cause texture
corruption/flickering.
Recommended Advanced Settings:
-NONE
How about Blood II?
-Sliderider, Unreal and Quake III weren't just benchmarks. They were real world performance. And it's not just Unreal or Quake III here, so many games give out pretty decent if not rather good framerates on the card. This would have been an awesome card in 1997 and still good in 1998.
Ah thanks, disabling lightmaps did the trick, should have red that.
The picture is part of an article with gallery. Permedia 2 was not a great gaming card for price it had. Even 3dlabs were not so serious with it and promised real gaming board with Permedia 3, but it took them incredibly long time.
wrote:Aha, so these are your benchmarks! That's good, makes them more trustworthy! Why doesn't the Permedia 2 do texturemapping on Sho […]
wrote:There is no Shogo result because Permedia 2 refuses to texture maps. Maybe I should exclude Unreal result too, because it looks like crap, flat shaded and so was Quake 3.
Aha, so these are your benchmarks! That's good, makes them more trustworthy!
Why doesn't the Permedia 2 do texturemapping on Shogo? Is it a bug on the drivers or the game? Have you tried the latest patch? The readme states that the card can't do Lightmapping.- Permedia2
Works well, although no lightmapping.
Recommended Display Settings:
-LOW or MEDIUM (lightmapping will automatically
be turned off on this card)
-Turning on Shadows or Model FullBrights may cause texture
corruption/flickering.Recommended Advanced Settings:
-NONE
How about Blood II?-Sliderider, Unreal and Quake III weren't just benchmarks. They were real world performance. And it's not just Unreal or Quake III here, so many games give out pretty decent if not rather good framerates on the card. This would have been an awesome card in 1997 and still good in 1998.
I know they were real games but once they became popular as performance benchmarks in reviews the card makers started optimizing for them which makes the results suspect. Playing a wide variety of games gives you a better idea of the true performance of a card because the drivers can't be optimized for all of them.
Games tested so far on Permedia 2:
Resident Evil 1
Resident Evil 2
Need For Speed III
GLQuake
Quake II
wrote:Yep. The MaxIMPACT boardset itself would have cost many, many times the price of a PC that you could play Quake on at the time it was released. However, it could do things that were just not possible on the PC at the time (dozens of lighting sources, 48bit colour, stereo imaging etc).
Yea the old big iron 3D workstation era was cool. Reminds me of arcade hardware like Sega Model 3 with fancy Lockheed hardware too. Exciting times.
Then some of those SGI guys saw a business opportunity to make arcade machines, and then memory prices plummeted in 95-96, and we got their Voodoo Graphics chipset on a PCI card. 😁
3DLabs wasn't big for games but were instrumental in making cheap workstation cards. Unfortunately the reality turned out to be game hardware first, then make it work with CAD apps.
decent framerate? par, maybe so but i would rate it roughly half the performance of riva128.
On the benchmark scores posted above, I am curious as to what cpu the card is being paired with. I have only ever used the card with cpus above 400mhz, and I always find it to be a reliable card for games from like early 1998 and prior. A lot of games that would run with issues on other cards like Wipeout XL, Twisted Metal 2, Bio Freaks, Resident Evil, etc would just run perfect on the Permedia 2. Due to that I have a couple of them that I'm keeping stowed away.
