For the record, Geforce will work with Voodoo 2, right???

Tetrium wrote:

For the record, Geforce will work with Voodoo 2, right???

Yep. I've been using a Voodoo 2 with a GeForce 2 MX, GeForce 2 Ti and a GeForce 4 Ti4200 for years now.

though the pcx2 does not work like the voodoo2. it doesn't operate as a second device for the same API, it has to take over the primary device explicitly. The geforce2 would give the pcx2 a middle finger, though Radeon, Voodoo3 and Kyro have *much* better luck with pcx2.

For SGL and OpenGL (which is wrapped to SGL via a MiniGL wrapper) it'll work fine with geforce since it doesn't need to take over primary. Direct3D on the other hand is problematic

so

don't mix geforce and pcx2

leileilol wrote:

Well I just installed Windows 98SE and installed Kernelex on that (to see if it's not a ME exclusive thing), and it works there […]
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Well I just installed Windows 98SE and installed Kernelex on that (to see if it's not a ME exclusive thing), and it works there also.

also, Turok Benchmarks

320x240 - 106.5
512x384 - 50.8
640x480 - 38.1
800x600 - 20.4
1024x768 - 13.0

Maybe kernelex is emulating some resource required by the game that the PCX can't do on it's own like how 3D Analyze works?

I used my Videologic 3Dx with a Radeon 9600 and yeah it seemed to worked fine.

The way these PowerVR chips transfer to the primary video card makes me curious about how much the primary video card and the PCI/AGP buses influence performance. Could PCI->AGP transfers be a bottleneck when using the PCX2 with an AGP video card?

swaaye wrote:

Could PCI->AGP transfers be a bottleneck when using the PCX2 with an AGP video card?

Can't be worse then doing PCI>PCI transfers though...and those are the only 2 realistic options anyway.

Well i'll tell you this, it ain't any faster when it's going through onboard VGA. Benchmarking Turok @ 640x480 lead to a 23.9 average result (rather than 38.1 through AGP) and 320x240 gets 40.3, so it's definitely slower. swaaye is onto something!

What is the onboard video you're using?

Somebody should stick an ISA video card in and see if it even works. 🤣

SiS 651.

Hold that vomit...

leileilol wrote:

SiS 651.

Hold that vomit...

I'm facing your direction, whoops too late.

Seems like the PCx2 is pretty graphics-card dependent (unlike Voodoo), after all, it does use all 4MB for texture memory.

Here's Heretic II. I used MiniGL 1.0.2.1 to replace g200gl.dll. Heretic 2 will WARN in the console that it does not support PowerVR and won't run but it does anyway.

Paletted textures must be turned off or models will be invisible.

Also, Elite Force 😁 r_primitives 3 needed to represent stuff. HUGE sorting issues. minigl 1.0.2.1 also used (1.0.6.0 makes the UI not show up)

It's pretty cool to see PCX2 going where it was definitely not meant to. 😁

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

Seems like the PCx2 is pretty graphics-card dependent (unlike Voodoo), after all, it does use all 4MB for texture memory.

Voodoo is self contained with its own output and all, but the PowerVR chips transfer the final frame to the primary video card via PCI bus so it has a strange additional possible bottleneck.

Voodoo Rush does this too, I believe, but it's a direct transfer from the Voodoo framebuffer to the 2D chip on the same card. Still it apparently did cause performance and compatibility problems.

swaaye wrote:

I used my Videologic 3Dx with a Radeon 9600 and yeah it seemed to worked fine.

The way these PowerVR chips transfer to the primary video card makes me curious about how much the primary video card and the PCI/AGP buses influence performance. Could PCI->AGP transfers be a bottleneck when using the PCX2 with an AGP video card?

Are you sure the Radeon wasn't doing the rendering? Have you tried with a 2D only card?

You'd know if the PowerVR does the rendering because how weird things look.

Rune's SGLDrv works after a KernelEx'ing. Runes quite well actually!

sliderider wrote:

Are you sure the Radeon wasn't doing the rendering? Have you tried with a 2D only card?

Unless a Radeon can run the PowerVR MechWarrior 2 port, yes I'm sure. 😁

I'm not complaining about poor performance. I'm just wondering about how different video cards impact the PowerVR board's performance.

leileilol wrote:

You'd know if the PowerVR does the rendering because how weird things look

Yeah what I noticed was the texture filtering not always working. Sometimes it would go from bilinear to what looked like nearest neighbor and back again. Funky bugs for a game using a chipset-specific API!

I haven't played many games on the PowerVR board though. Mainly just Mechwarrior 2 PowerVR.

I should mention I managed to make the Geforce and PCX2 get along by having Kernelex disabled by default and using DirectX 9.0b.

Don't know if either one made it work but I guess I was jumping to conclusions too early. I wish it were faster though but i'm not raising the PCI bus from 33 to 40mhz, I don't want to risk damage.

I really like the ninja posting and editing happening right now.

Here's some Quake2 screenshots, just for the record of how things look on it. The game officially supports the PCX2.

40MHz PCI speed causes the card to hard lock, but it didn't fry. I did see Turok 320x240 do 130 average score briefly when it happened. It's quite a marginal gain.

or it could be SiS being a SiSSy

Way to squeeze as much as possible out of a (then-$20) card. 😀 Quake 2 actually looks decent, but then again, it's officially supported by the card (though "wrappified"). Will it actually run in 24-bit color depth if you set the desktop to 24bpp?

Q2 without its late 90s rainbow colored lighting is just not Q2. 😀

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

Will it actually run in 24-bit color depth if you set the desktop to 24bpp?

No. Even though the options are there, there's no way I can get it to 24/32bit rendering!