I don't know about ALL the different PVR chips, but at the very least, PowerVR2 CLX uses Tile-based deferred rendering, which breaks the frame into 32 triangle strips (small enough to fit in cache on-chip, and uses Hidden Surface Removal on each tile, so avoiding having to use Z-surface culling later (basically, the PVR doesn't draw anything that won't be seen), which reduces the total amount of bandwidth needed.

I have no idea if that applies to all the various PVR chips, so I'm sure someone who has one and is far more knowledgeable that I can fill you in on the details.

So will it have any effect in games not specifically designed to use/look for it?

PowerVR PCX2 works by passing video output through the bus to the host card. Try to prefer 24/32bit color where possible so it can transfer faster.

The PowerVR's driver provides a tab in the Display Properties that has a checkbox to use the HAL for all Direct3D games. Uncheck this if you want to use your host card or secondary video card (Voodoo) for that. This checkbox only applies to Direct3D. You can also enable it for specific games by adding profiles for games you want to run with the PowerVR card.

Games that use SGL should use the card automatically. Unlike the Direct3D HAL, OpenGL should not detect the card, it can only use the card via using certain MiniGL DLLs with games as the PCX2 does not have an ICD.

I think I76's startup crash is sound related? Try to turn down the sound acceleration in dxdiag and see if that makes a difference. If it were a video card causing the crash, it would occur after "SOMEWHERE IN THE SOUTHWEST..." fades out.

Finally, PowerVR PCX2 only has driver support for Win9x.

Relatively to the Mystique 220 you should be able to see much cleaner 3d image quality, true alpha blending, ordered dithering, and bilinear filtering. You will not see blending functions beyond alpha blending so getting a Voodoo is still a good idea. You can't pair the PCX2 with a Geforce card.

Wicked, thanks!

I was hoping it would accelerate some things, but I bet the sticking point has been Direct3D. OldQuake was a pretty disappointing affair, and one I'm reasonably sure wasn't tied to the P2 @ 350mhz. Screamer 2 was choppy and kept crashing. And Streets of Sim City is just its usual godawful self. 😁

I'll play with display properties settings, and try to fix that I76 issue.

Screamer 2 is not supported by the PowerVR card. To see supported SGL (its native API) see my list in my signature.

It must be a sound issue. DxDiag reports several directx driver errors, but most of the issues are with the SB32. I'm not sure I have the correct drivers installed for the SB32, I used AWE32 drivers since that's what seems to be the best fit, and it does show as an SB16 which sounds about right (Vibra 16 chip).

Is there a way to disable sound acceleration in Windows 95 that I'm not seeing? Or is the SB32 not capable of that anyway?