[Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Discussion of development and patch submission.
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Siggy12
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Joined: Sat 21 Jul, 2018 6:04 pm

[Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by Siggy12 »

Hello,

I want to know if there will be a chance/hope to see those video cards (Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2) and also some (Matrox Mystique, millenium , G200) emulated in PCem.

Thank You.
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MiraiMiracle
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by MiraiMiracle »

Good request (now it's not).
Last edited by MiraiMiracle on Tue 13 Oct, 2020 6:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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SarahWalker
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by SarahWalker »

One day? Maybe. But it would be several years out - emulating even one of these cards would be a vast amount of work, and I have no plans to work on any of them in the foreseeable future.
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leilei
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by leilei »

No public documentation or spec sheets (Working from xfree86 source wouldn't be enough) and the only actual Nvidia emulation code around is the Xbox GF3 stuff in MAME and Xqemu and those are missing features present in the early Nvidia cards. It's barely less secretive than PowerVR. I think the only public documentation regards the much later (and very much irrelevant and out of scope) Geforce GTX series
Zup
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by Zup »

I wonder if it would be possible to make a "fake" pass-through video card...

I mean, a "fake" video card in the sense that it would appear as a physical one; a pass-through in the sense that any DirectX / OpenGL call would be passed to the OS. It would require to write code inside PCem and drivers for the different OSs to make the pass-through.

Note that this is a random thought, in no manner is a request.
Siggy12
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by Siggy12 »

Thank You Sarah and Leilei for answer.
anyway those videocards was really good at their era and see them on PCem will be awesome hoping that one day will be possible.
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leilei
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by leilei »

The least that could happen is an attempt to reproduce various rendering quirks on Voodoo interpreter code as fun learning patches not intended for inclusion:

- nVidia's 16x16 dither matrix that slightly resembles ordered dither on a restore-down button. Sounds like a CPU cache killer at that size
- Poor blending precision (Riva128; the PCem voodoo code outdoes the Riva128 in render quality by a huge margin)
- blocky texture filter stepping (Geforce256)
- Per-face LOD (Riva128)
- Round-up all rectangle textures to squares (Riva128)

On the other hand (in my theoretical opinion), emulating a Voodoo4 would cover a lot of what would've been Riva TNT2 regarding compatibility and capability. Nvidia TNT2 and earlier wouldn't be worth the effort of reverse engineering especially given they don't really have any proprietary unique APIs that give them exclusives (just Creative vendor-lockin for a couple things like the Unreal D3D shadows patch exclusive to the 3d Blaster TNT, and probably an early glide wrapper for TNT which would be a little redundant)
tk421
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Re: [Request] Nvidia Riva 128 , TNT, TNT2 ,Matrox video cards

Post by tk421 »

I had a TNT 2 Riva and a Voodoo 3 back in the day. I am not sure about this, but from I read online today, 2 Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode were supposed to outperform the TNT 2. I always remembered the Voodoo 3 more fondly than the old nvidia card I had back then. This is nothing against the nvidia cards sold back then, but I am sure the Voodoo 3 was the more reliable card.

In PCem, I felt the lone Voodoo 2 card performed better than having the two voodoos running in SLI mode. The performance of the Voodoo 2 was impressive. I had 12mb of video memory with the lone Voodoo 2, and 16mb in SLI mode. I was very impressed with this feature in PCem. 16mb of video memory is roughly equal to a voodoo 3.

The Voodoo 4 is an interesting idea, but I wonder if the Voodoo 3 would be the easier solution to the questions being raised here about introducing a new 3D graphics card in PCem. Personally, I know I would love to see that feature added to PCem, but the work done on the Voodoo 2 was really well done. It was a big upgrade to PCem, and really improves what we can do with the program.
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