3 ms·
I had one of these around 1997. It was pretty fast and affordable, but had some major holes in its feature set. I remember it didn’t support OpenGL style custom
by pavlov 5y ago
I had one of these around 1997. It was pretty fast and affordable, but had some major holes in its feature set. I remember it didn’t support OpenGL style custom blending, so a game that rendered explosions using an additive-blended sphere would just display an opaque expanding sphere.
Games that were specifically tuned for its feature set could look great though. These cards had sharper VGA output than the 3dfx Voodoo which required an analog passthrough from a separate 2D graphics card (the Voodoo was a pure 3D accelerator).
I thought about getting a 3dfx Voodoo but then realized I don’t really play 3D games anyway. The PowerVR clocked in maybe four hours of total use by me, and nobody wanted the card because of its reputation.
- rasz 5y ago>These cards had sharper VGA output than the 3dfx Voodoo These cards had no VGA output whatsoever, and rendered straight to dedicated 2D cards framebuffer.
- wsc981 5y agoAh that makes me wonder if my father’s PC had a similar GPU. I played Half-life at the time, and shortly after the tentacle boss, you’d had to swim underwater. However this water was just rendered in a opaque color, so at that point I could not finish the game. Not an idea where to go.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago(A 20 years late) hint - just switch to software mode, duh.
- kmeisthax 5y ago"Explosions don't alpha-blend correctly" is particularly odd given that TBDR's strength was supposed to be alpha blending.
- Simon_Fe 5y agoSeries 1, eg, PCX1 and PCX2 had (SRC_Alpha, 1 - SRC_Alpha) blending, but not the full set of OpenGL options. When series 2 was released (Eg, ARC1, Dreamcast, Neon250), it had the full set including support for destination alpha, which IIRC wasn't available on eg 3dfx.