Back in the Q3 area my kids comp was out fitted with a AMD K6-2 400 and a Voodoo2. Settings had to be cranked down to 640x480 and low quality to make the game playable. I blame the K6-2.

I on the other hand had a Celeron 300a@450 and a voodoo 3, and it was smoking.

think I had a k6-2 350

yeah, the K6-2 is to blame here...

Yeah definitely. Nice CPUs but way worse performance wise. They had great prices though 😁

I can confirm what davros said. Using a K6-2 400, 128 RAM and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP clocked at the same specs as a 3500 , Quake 3 is sluggish on Medium Details and 640x480. It used to give around 40 fps on my Pentium 3 500 on the same settings. On the K6-2 it's really unstable. If you're looking at many enemies it can easily drop to 15 fps. Normally you get around 22 and when you're facing a wall you're getting around 30.
The cpu is the problem here. I'm going to overclock it and see how it fares.

This is a PowerVR thread, and I have to mention how odd the crappy PowerVR PCX2 gets the same framerates in Q3 your Voodoo3 does.

Quake 3 runs horrible on even the fastest K6 CPUs.

It's great with a Geforce2 and a K6-2, though. Also try throwing in r_lodbias 1 and cg_simpleItems 1, that'll help the cpu get choked less

It's a lot better with a mid P2 or a P3 than any K6, even K6-III+. At the same clock speed the K6 will be blown away.

I just thought of this because you mentioned the old PowerVR PCX2 was running as fast as his Voodoo3. That would be a CPU bottleneck.

Brings back memories how much Duron blew some of my friend's minds when they went from a K6-2 to it. 😁

The PCX2 actually doesn't go faster than it does, a Pentium II 233 or 300 will max the card out. The poor thing's not very futureproof. 🙁

Also I don't remember Q3 running slow on 3dfx on k6, it could just well be driver dependant for the speed there. Anything less than 300mhz k6-2 will suck, though ill give you my word on that!

leileilol wrote:

The PCX2 actually doesn't go faster than it does, a Pentium II 233 or 300 will max the card out. The poor thing's not very futureproof. 🙁

The Voodoo 1 wasn't future proof either. I remember when I upgraded my Pentium 75@100 to a P166mmx@200 and Quake still gave me the exact same frame rate.

Don't judge by one game. Pentium 75 or 100 is a very big bottleneck for a voodoo 1. If you upgraded to a P166 or 200 as you did the difference in many games was gigantic.

F2bnp wrote:

Don't judge by one game. Pentium 75 or 100 is a very big bottleneck for a voodoo 1. If you upgraded to a P166 or 200 as you did the difference in many games was gigantic.

It's just that when I upgraded my CPU, none of my games I had at the time benefited. Not Quake, Tomb Raider, Descent ,Ultimate Race Pro, Moto Racer. I was somewhat let down, but I had already heard of the issue so I shrugged it off.

But those were the games of the time, Quake II may benefit with a greater CPU but it wasn't even released yet. And after it was, you wanted to play it with a Voodoo 2 because the Voodoo 1 was now the limiting factor. That and the P200 wasn't gonna cut it either.

Motorhead has a PowerSGL Driver 😳!!!!! so I took some shots from it.

FPS is 30-40 at 640x480 with a few cars, though it's slow with all of them onscreen but that's a CPU thing as it's the same speed in software and with the *better* Kyro2. To prove that it's playable, I just won the race in this freakingly hard game in 1st place.

Also recently the nullDC Dreamcast emulator became open source, and I wonder if this driver could be forked as a SGL.dll wrapper for modern hardware.... 😀

Sin runs great! At least in multiplayer on the demo. Haven't tested the full version

Soldier of Fortune has a lot of texture caching issues, doesn't blend the level's lightmap and also freezes after a while.

Wipeout XL/2097 is Direct3D but has a "exclusive PowerVR version" which is that but with blend modes changed appropriately. It refuses to run on anything else, and it's not SGL.

Mechwarrior 3 demo has additive rain and flares, and screwed up fog and explosion smoke, which is strange for something promoted to support PVR. What's odd when the PCX2 is detected, the game will try to force initialization on it even when PowerVR HAL is disabled, so I can't run this on my primary video card.

I just picked up my first ever powervr card. Any idea how one can distinguish between the pcx-1 and pcx-2? I'll try it out later this week hopefully if I have some time. Putting my k6-3+ rig back together atm.

pcx-2 is faster, and has bilinear filtering

leileilol wrote:

pcx-2 is faster, and has bilinear filtering

Faster, really? How much?

by 4%

It's not a significant speed jump I don't think.

leileilol wrote:

by 4%

It's not a significant speed jump I don't think.

Yeah I was thinking they just added filtering.