Leileilol would be the one to ask about early PowerVR cards.

Try resitting the card in it's PCI slot, or try a different slot.

There should be some PowerVR tech demos on the installation cd that you can install on your machine. if those work ok, the card is fine.

There's also a PNP bios setting that can interfere with the card's detection. I forgot what exactly it was though

I had similar trouble with an Apocalypse PCX2 PowerVR card recently. I tried various mobos, and various PCI slots. Eventually it worked. I came to the conclusion that my failed attempts were due to not using the card in a PCI slot that supported bus mastering. However, I don't know whether this is applicable to the Matrox M3D card. I would suggest trying all of the PCI slots on a couple of mobos.

Cool, I'll try moving the card around. It's in PCI Slot #2, I seem to recall hearing something about Slot#2 sharing resources with the AGP slot. So in the end that sort of message means that the PCX2 is not responding?

What you could try, just to see it working, is to remove the AGP card, and put in any PCI video card in slot #1. I would leave the M3D in slot #2. When I finally got the Apocalypse to work, I had this combo. BTW, I thought that slot #1 shared its resources with the AGP slot.

The PCX2 itself wouldn't care what its host card is by the way. It'll work with AGP 8x even. It'll even work with onboard VGA, and that's the worst performance bottleneck.

Also, in case you're going to try a PCX2/Geforce combo - I've experienced trouble with PCX2 and Geforce drivers, Nvidia made them aggressive to be their card as the absolute primary, which causes memory issues that leads to a instant crash where it'll just not work at all anymore for the running windows session

I should note the above blurb is relevant only for Direct3D... OpenGL and SGL are fine with PCX2+GF

It's partner card will be a Voodoo3. I'm hoping to use it with my Voodoo3 3000 so I can do TV out, maybe record some sample videos for my youtube channel, perhaps show some contrasts between Glide and SGL, for no other good reason than "because I can" 😜

However, that said, how does the PCX2 fair with PCIe boards? Not exactly a common thing, but has anyone tried?

maddmaxstar wrote:

It's partner card will be a Voodoo3. I'm hoping to use it with my Voodoo3 3000 so I can do TV out, maybe record

🤣 THATS MY COMBO FOR MY PCX2 RECORDINGS
🤣

maddmaxstar wrote:

However, that said, how does the PCX2 fair with PCIe boards? Not exactly a common thing, but has anyone tried?

PCIe isn't available on Win9x, and PCX2 only had drivers for Win9x - you'll never find out the answer.

Damn the PCX2 is a finicky b**ch. I can confirm the card is working, but I had to clean the contacts with a white eraser, remove all PCI cards and try the card in each slot to check if it works.

Finally, the thing finally fired up in PCI Slot 1 (3rd try), directly adjacent to the passively cooled Voodoo3. Doesn't do a bad job running Quake or Quake II, I would have loved to have one of these back in 98-99 when all I had was a SiS6236.

So I put in a Cardslot Blower fan beside the card, swapped the Voodoo3 2000 for the 3000 from my Athlon 550, and reinstalled the Realtek 8139 NIC card. Everything reinstalled OK, but then the PowerVR stopped working. So I removed the 8139, sure enough, the PowerVR works.

So now I'm gonna try it with a 3Com 3C905-TX installed, and see if the PowerVR likes that better. If that doesn't work, I might have to try an ISA NIC. That's alot of work just to get a Budget 3D Card from 1997-99 working!

Now I know what Leileilol means by "hitting the PCX2 in the face until it works ."