First post, by hifidelitygaming
So have PowerVR cards developed any kind of collector mentality driving up prices, or is it still few and far enough between that I can probably find stuff for $10? :)
Being the obscure gaming nut that I am, i'm speccing out systems optimized for playing older games, even though i'm not quite sure when they'll get built - more to have an opportunistic shopping list so that if I ever run across something for cheap i'll know what I can use it for in the future.
My understanding is that the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 was the best PowerVR card ever made. It sounds like the later Videologic VividXS cards with 64meg would be the same. I'm not sure if there are any other Kyro II cards with 64meg, or whether either of the above cards have an advantage over them even if so. I've heard the cards will run at 1.5v fine, but being AGP 2x/4x native i'm not sure if that means they will work in a modern 8x slot. (been long enough since we used AGP I can't remember anymore, I know the Voodoo cards WOULDN'T work on 8x slots and even had wrong keying which could short out the card for some models apparently, I don't know if anyone else had this problem but it's why I can't go by the recommendations that if it plugs in it will work - it didnt for 3dfx) I'd like to use one in an ASRock Core2Duo 775 motherboard if possible as it's one of if not the fastest AGP based boards I know of, and also runs win98 natively.
It's possible that i'm putting the cart before the horse though - what games even used PowerVR/SGL in the first place? Did anything use that API past some of the late 90's PCX2 games which supported it directly? I assume the Series 3 Kyro2 chipset would run those 'native SGL' games as well without a problem and at the highest quality possible? Even if games might have supported the Series 3 chipset directly, did any of them actually look better on a Kyro2 than on comparable DX7 hardware from nvidia or ATI? If such a card is only good for running older PCX1/2 games maybe the 32meg version is fine since maybe those games wont allow higher resolutions anyways, or maybe even the Kyro1 card is fine because it will 60fps everything from the 90's at max allowed resolution.
Again, my goal isn't to just force games to play on the PowerVR card, but rather to run games that happened to look better (or possibly only exclusively ran on, were there PowerVR only games?) in that mode. I could be on a wild goosechase. :) However I heard that Tomb Raider looked better on a PowerVR (just slower on the cards at the time) than it did on 3dfx, I don't know if that still applies vs higher end 3dfx cards and wrappers though.