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PowerVR PCX2 results with Windows 98SE

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First post, by janskjaer

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Has anyone experienced issues with using a PowerVR PCX2 in Windows 98SE?
I know that all the drivers that were released, both manufacturer based (Videologic, Matrox) and generic, even up to the latest version (4.1.2) were explicitly designed for Windows 95, but I can't think of any reason why these wouldn't transition over to Windows 98.

Both of my PowerVR PCX2 cards (Matrox m3D and Videologic Apocalypse 3Dx) work perfectly in my Win95 system (see sig)
However, in my Win98 system (for Win98, the 3GB RAM is restricted to 512MB with MaxPhysPage and MaxFileCache), I've had a few issues.

The first issue was the PCX2 not being recognised when trying to install the drivers for it. The Add New Hardware wizard would refuse to recognise any version of the drivers. Eventually, I narrowed this down to a BIOS setting where the initial display device was set to "PCI". Switching this to "AGP" (even though my 2D card is also PCI and the PCX2 is installed in PCI slot 2), seemed to do the trick and now all versions of the driver are recognised by Win98.
I'm not 100% convinced this was the cause. Initially, I thought this had something to do with the PCX2 not being installed in PCI slot 1. However, even when switching to a 2D AGP card and moving the PCX2 to PCI slot 1, it still didn't solve the problem. With the BIOS change, things are working and I don't want to disturb that.

Now, the PCX2 seems to work perfectly for the PowerVR SGL demos and OpenGL based games such as GLQuake (using PowerVR's OPENGL32.DLL) and Quake II (via PowerVR OpenGL).
However, there are some issues with the card being recognised as a Direct3D device.
The card is not recognised by Final Reality or 3D Winbench 98, but it is recognised by 3DMark99 and 3Dfx's WizMark Lite. There also seems to be some issue trying to initiate PowerVR SGL for Unreal v226.
I think the issue with Final Reality and 3DWB98 is simply due to the PCX2 not being recognised as an external Direct3D device. For these, benchmarks I have to choose the "Primary Display Adapter" but ensure I'm using the 3DCC tool and Direct3D is switched to "PowerVR".

However, when running the Final Reality benchmark, the results are comparative to that of my 2D card and not to a historical result I already have based on the PCX2. So, I'm not sure how to test the card with Final Reality.

Has anyone else had some odd results when using a PCX2 with Windows 98?

DELL Dimension XPS M200s
:Intel P1 MMX 200MHz
:64MB EDO
:DOS 6.22/Win95b
:Matrox Millenium II + m3D (PowerVR PCX2)
Chaintech 7VJL Apogee
:AMD AthlonXP 2700+
:512MB DDR
:Win98SE/2000 SP4
:3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP

Reply 1 of 2, by leileilol

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I believe that's all motherboard chipset specific. I had to use WinME for a fast PCX2 with mine.

The latter HAL behavior is intended. The "Use PowerVR" checkbox in the display properties tab enables the HAL override.

Unreal's regressed SGLDrv in one of the patches. Gold doesn't even include SGLDrv at all.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 2 of 2, by janskjaer

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leileilol wrote:

I believe that's all motherboard chipset specific. I had to use WinME for a fast PCX2 with mine.

The latter HAL behavior is intended. The "Use PowerVR" checkbox in the display properties tab enables the HAL override.

Unreal's regressed SGLDrv in one of the patches. Gold doesn't even include SGLDrv at all.

I do think the 3DCC works for the HAL override in most cases, but I believe Final Reality is somewhat of an exception as in this case, the only hardware option to choose is the "Direct3D On-board Accelerator". The results I get from it for both 2D and 3D are exactly the same as my Rendition Verite V2200, to the frame. Considering I have previous results for my PCX2 to compare to, I can say that Final Reality is ignoring the PCX2 card. That said, it's one benchmark, as opposed to many that appear to be working correctly.

After testing from Unreal v205, through all patches to 226f, I can confirm that the last one that works with SGL (in my case) is v221. v224 and later appear to be broken and error when trying to initialise SGL.
Similarly, patching to v226f and replacing the included SGLDrv.dll with the one from v221 does not work either. It complains that SGLDrv.dll "cannot be found". I suspect this is because a hash of the .dll is used by Unreal to verify the signature of the file before importing its libraries.
The Unreal patches I used are here: https://www.oldunreal.com/officialpatches.html

While I was searching for the patches, I came across this article: https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/sgldr … plained.198365/
An enjoyable read 🤣 Concise and informative, and the last line you wrote about the Neon 250 did make me 🤣. 😀

DELL Dimension XPS M200s
:Intel P1 MMX 200MHz
:64MB EDO
:DOS 6.22/Win95b
:Matrox Millenium II + m3D (PowerVR PCX2)
Chaintech 7VJL Apogee
:AMD AthlonXP 2700+
:512MB DDR
:Win98SE/2000 SP4
:3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP

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