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PowerVR Fun Thread

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Reply 640 of 1096, by The Serpent Rider

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Scali wrote:

Its timing was just a bit unfortunate, as well as the choice for the media they used. The later Xbox and PS2 basically did everything better.

Not everything. PS2 had some issues with color depth and mipmapping which Dreamcast didn't had. And both PS2 and Xbox lacked hardware "It's just works!" shadow volumes.
But tech gap between Dreamcast (1998) and Xbox (2001) is still quite huge, enough to be considered different console generations. Very compact design of the Dreamcast didn't do it any favors either.

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Reply 641 of 1096, by leileilol

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The other consoles can do buffer effects. Those are 500% more important than limited shadow modifier volumes. DC can only buffer in a previous frame.

also there's mip and color depth issues with the Dreamcast as well, and I feel the early games with large contrasty busy textures tried to mask that....

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Reply 642 of 1096, by Garrett W

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If we want to get picky, I'm not sure I even like the look of low res bilinear filtered textures, and in that sense, games on the PS2 have aged a lot better for me or if you want to bring this on the PC,
Quake's Software renderer >>>>> GLQuake for me 😀.

Reply 643 of 1096, by The Serpent Rider

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I'm not sure I even like the look of low res bilinear filtered textures, and in that sense, games on the PS2

They are filtered though.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 644 of 1096, by Garrett W

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Yeah, brainfart! Meant to say that PS2 games usually lack mipmapping which makes distant textures look much sharper than a lot of the games on the Dreamcast for example (Shenmue excluded of course).

Reply 645 of 1096, by Scali

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Mipmapping can be done quite efficiently with a TBDR, on-the-fly generation of mipmaps is just another stroke of genius by the PVR designers.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 646 of 1096, by leileilol

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^ which has its disadvantages, like you can't explicitly upload mipmaps for quality tweaking or debugging (well at least I can't in OpenGL)

also by the way earlier I posted about the PC3DEngine demos out before it got buried by newpage DC fanwank

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Reply 647 of 1096, by sheath

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I managed to get Expendable running without inverted colors with my m3D PCX-2. I'm not sure if I read it here, but the force 16-bit textures setting does the trick, then the game runs amazingly slow whenever an inverted color non-transparent transparency is on screen. I'm thinking there should be other settings that could address this, maybe just turn off transparencies entirely? Has anybody had any success?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phnTl7qNyas

Reply 650 of 1096, by leileilol

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I was looking at old Dreamcast press screenshots and noticed it blurs vertically for interlaced mode as a form of flicker reduction (sometimes mistakenly hyped as anti-aliasing by certain fans) BUT!!! I've noticed it applies it before the dither so we get a weird, dithered, flicker-reducted 16bpp image that might end up flickering a little on a TV because of the dither.

so i made a post-process shader of that in like 20 minutes

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Reply 652 of 1096, by Myloch

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GordonFreeman wrote:

I think this may have been discussed before, but PureVex, ReVolte, and Moon Racer are PowerSGL-only, right?

Yep, and before you ask, the chance for you to find the first one (legally or illegally) is basically zero.

"Gamer & collector for passion, I firmly believe in the preservation and the diffusion of old/rare software, against all personal egoisms"

Reply 653 of 1096, by sheath

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leileilol wrote:

I was looking at old Dreamcast press screenshots and noticed it blurs vertically for interlaced mode as a form of flicker reduction (sometimes mistakenly hyped as anti-aliasing by certain fans) BUT!!! I've noticed it applies it before the dither so we get a weird, dithered, flicker-reducted 16bpp image that might end up flickering a little on a TV because of the dither.

so i made a post-process shader of that in like 20 minutes

I've finally been able to see the dithering over VGA on my 50" plasma screen in some Dreamcast games. Full Screen dithering on PS1 and PS2 was visible over S-Video on my SDTVs, I never would have guessed it was in Shenmue too. I figured, just based on the edges, that very few if any Dreamcast games actually used anti-aliasing though. I've read from various sources that the Neon 250 and PVR2-DC renders internally at 32-bit color and then down samples, can that be confirmed here? It doesn't really matter if the image processing is adding dithering, but the more accurate information the better.

Reply 655 of 1096, by Scali

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leileilol wrote:

ALL PowerVR cards process internally in 24-bit color no matter what, even the PCX2

Yup, 16-bit rendering is mainly for immediate mode renderers, who get bottlenecked by the lack of bandwidth in 24/32-bit mode.
Since PowerVR performs all rendering and shading inside the tile cache anyway, there is no such bottleneck, so there is little reason to even bother implementing any kind of 16-bit rendering pipeline at all. The tile can just be downconverted from 24-bit to 16-bit on-the-fly when blting it back to the framebuffer memory.
TBDR is just so beautifully elegant.

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Reply 656 of 1096, by GordonFreeman

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Myloch wrote:

Yep, and before you ask, the chance for you to find the first one (legally or illegally) is basically zero.

Yeah, I know. I did find the demo, though.

I’m actually kind of surprised by how well those 3 games run on the m3D. ReVolte, for example, runs at a near-constant 60fps. I almost thought that the games were actually using my Voodoo 3, but that’s not possible since they use SGL.

Reply 657 of 1096, by lolo799

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Pictures from a small booklet for Enigma:

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A copy of it was sold last december for the "high" price of 500 yens... https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/l444427560

PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 658 of 1096, by leileilol

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Heavily refactored and combined my powervr post shaders together.

Dreamcast interlaced output

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PCX2 output 😜

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Reply 659 of 1096, by MrSmiley381

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Well, this is pretty awesome. Per my usual pattern of -> purchase oddball hardware -> fight with it and unrelated issues for hours -> attain results, I managed to acquire a brand new M3D a month back. Got around to testing it with my Voodoo 5500 and an A7V333 with an Athlon 3000+ being clocked at roughly 1 GHz, factoring in the double-stepping, 500 MHz clock speed, and 100 MHz FSB. Tomb Raider hates running in Windows but pure DOS is just fine. Single buffer mode at 400 x 300 can hit the 60 FPS target pretty easily, minus a few of the more intense scenes. It seems like that as the card hits certain frame rates it starts to cap itself. Sometimes it shoots for 30, sometimes 60, but if I set the resolution as low as possible and leave it single buffered it'll climb to 90+, pixelated rather comically. I guess given the DOS Compatibility Matrix this is to be expected. Does anyone have a recommendation for a CPU/GPU combo that does a better job around the 800 x 600 range? I know a huge chunk of the performance on these cards has to do with the host GPU, PCI transfer rates, and whatnot. Barring any other recommendations, I may move this to a Super Socket 7 build for better native DOS sound card support, or maybe a Pentium III or III-S. I really just want to play the games supporting the hardware natively with that 60 FPS target. The ones I care about most are probably Mechwarrior 2, Resident Evil, Virtual On, Tomb Raider, ReLoaded, and Unreal. I'm sure I'll encounter plenty of headaches along the way.

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.