I've heavily procrastinated on this because i've yet to figure out the memory addresses and stuff like that. i've tried to fill the emulated powervr memory with garbage, hoping for the driver to pick it up to no avail.
I might have to dump my real card running somehow for studying. Not getting much of a clue how the internals work going through all the confidential documentation, which mostly only covers on how the low-level SGL api works being its most explicit detail
(also supposedly, using the PCX2 with a Voodoo3 will give it the Voodoo's dac filter, but i've never seen this happen in my captures)
some things I know on the real hardware:
- Bandwidth is the primary bottleneck, followed by texture cache and possibly polygon limit. Is fastest at 320x200
- It can do quads and "n-sided polygons"
- Minimum texture size is 32x32, and the driver will upsample lower textures than that to 32x32
- Screen is composed of 32x32 tiles
- it's a 24-bit card that has a 16-bit post dither, being the default configuration. 24-bit can be unlocked through the registry and is actually faster
- the bilinear filtering precision is like PCem's Voodoo blinear code, but much less precise (even wobbles in some extreme close ups), and even less precise on alpha channels
- nothing blends! No blending functions at all. Only alpha. Unlike ViRGE, the alpha can be modulated at least.
- nVidia cards don't get along with its Direct3D HAL. If you've got a real PCX2, please don't use an nVidia card with it (ati, matrox and 3dfx are fine)
- averages
24fps in Turok, roughly half
the performance of a 3dfx Voodoo Graphics in PCem
- Unreal shipped with support for this card from the initial release. Support of it kinda got dummied out in the later UE1 titles, but could be undummied and functioning with a bit of kernelex and hexing trickery so you could play Deus Ex, Rune, Unreal Tournament, etc. on this card
- The video card variants in the Apocalypse 3D line mash a Tseng ET6100 for the 2D core on the same board, as well as an ESS Agogo-XP for sound
- Techland's SGL MiniGL can get this card into running games you'd never think it would run ever (i.e. Q3, MDK2)
