Thursday, March 24th 2022
Imagination Technologies Releases Open Source Drivers for PowerVR Series 1
If you owned an Apocalypse 3d/3dx or Matrox m3D, you would've been one of many gamers that had bought a PowerVR Series 1 based 3D graphics accelerator and was both excited and underwhelmed at the same time. Released originally in 1996 and the PCX1 manufactured a 500 nm and a core clock speed of whopping 60 MHz, it was the only direct competitor of 3dfx's original Voodoo graphics card, which was technically slower at 50 MHz, but delivered a lot better in terms of 3D quality. Here we are in 2022 and Imagination Technologies, the company behind the PCX1 and the die shrunk PCX2 that was launched a year later, is releasing the drivers for both 3D accelerators as open source. Outside of a big nostalgia trip for those that might still have their card knocking around, there's questionable value in these drivers.
The second generation of PowerVR GPU's ended up powering the Sega Dreamcast with the third generation ending up in PC GPUs that were competitive with the NVIDIA GeForce 256, at least until NVIDIA changed from SDR to DDR memory. The most unique part of the PowerVR Series 1 was that the 3D accelerator could use the main 2D display cards memory as a framebuffer over the PCI bus. Sadly most games didn't support the PowerSGL API at the time and weren't able to take full advantage of the hardware when DirectX 3.0 was used. The open source drivers are provided as is and it seems like some libraries are missing for the Tomb Raider port for the PoverVR Series 1 3D accelerators, but beyond that, there should be no limitations.
Sources:
Github, via CNX-Software, picture via Wikipedia
The second generation of PowerVR GPU's ended up powering the Sega Dreamcast with the third generation ending up in PC GPUs that were competitive with the NVIDIA GeForce 256, at least until NVIDIA changed from SDR to DDR memory. The most unique part of the PowerVR Series 1 was that the 3D accelerator could use the main 2D display cards memory as a framebuffer over the PCI bus. Sadly most games didn't support the PowerSGL API at the time and weren't able to take full advantage of the hardware when DirectX 3.0 was used. The open source drivers are provided as is and it seems like some libraries are missing for the Tomb Raider port for the PoverVR Series 1 3D accelerators, but beyond that, there should be no limitations.
27 Comments on Imagination Technologies Releases Open Source Drivers for PowerVR Series 1
That said, the Kyro and Kyro II were pretty decent for their time.
This is not the only thing Imagination open-sourced. They also added an open-source Vulkan driver for PowerVR Rogue GPUs with a promise of opening more parts for this modern line of GPUs.
Notes for the curious: S3's ViRGE(/VX) launched the same month as Voodoo 1. Other direct competition includes Rendition's Verite 1000, Creative's 3D Blaster, 3DLabs' Permedia 1, ATi's 3D Rage, and Matrox's Millennium and Mystique.
It was the only competition at the time, the other companies weren't doing 3D until a bit later, if you check the dates.
It was also the only other 3D accelerator, everyone else ended up doing 2D and 3D chips.
The S3 Virge wasn't really what I'd call a 3D card in the early days, at least not by any useful means, nor would I call the Rage II from ATI a 3D card. Yes, they did accelerate a couple of things, but they couldn't keep up with the Voodoo or the PowerVR Series 1. The same goes for the Matrox cards, that were excellent at 2D output, but not so much when it comes to 3D.
You're correct about the Rendition Vérité V1000, I thought that launched later. Permedia wasn't for consumers, sorry.
Pretty much all the first gen hardware from everyone was not great and 3dfx really stood out compared to the competition.
Personally I was really disappointed with my m3D, as it didn't work in half of the games I was playing at the time.
Even in reviewsit's being called a "consumer" chip.
There is a terrific YouTube series about all those early 3D cards, it's very entertaining looking at how bad some of them were :)
I remember Rendition having really the only good hardware that could be compared to what 3DFX was doing. Don't really remember what happened to them though as they seemed like they just kinda disappeared.
3Dlabs never had a consumer card. I think to the extent they were consumer facing they had cards that were powerful enough and sort of affordable to lower the price of entry into 3D development on PCs which previously need completely purpose built 3D workstations?
Kinda too bad PowerVR didn't stick around in the PC space, it always seemed like their technology was good enough they just never had the backing they needed.
I remember a couple games that used Power VR. I recall they always seemed that they looked 'better' and had a nice sharp rendering style.
Further, unlike the windows libraries/dirvers, there wasn't any concept of DLLs on DOS so unless you also have the source code for Tomb Raider, you couldn't make use of them anyway.**
**unless you were planning on writing your own PowerVR accelerated DOS games!But did you look at SW 3D rendering at the time!? You'd be lucky to get 320x200 at reasonable speed and forget about texture filtering!
At least with PCX1/2 you had games running at 800x600 or 1024x768 in 24bit colour.
I have no animosity against the product as such, it was just something of an anticlimax once I got the card.
I guess it could also have been because my PC wasn't high-end enough to drive the card at its best, but I remember several games being kind of glitchy when it came to textures at times.
I only had an AMD 5k86-P75 at the time, which I guess was technically a souped up 486...
Still, the Series 1 cards were a one of kind product and the later products were much better.
I had the current CMO at Imagination come over and hand deliver the Kyro and Kyro II cards to the lab for testing when I was working for PCW around the time they launched. Still keeping in touch with him. Those were a huge step in the right direction, it's just a shame it stopped there.
On the topic of Imagination, it does seem like we might get to see a return to the PC market, albeit through some efforts in china, which may never make it to the rest of the world. We could do with more competition in the graphics card market.
I could imagine that ARC-1 and Neon250 might be possible, but CLX2, which went into Dreamcast, I think had some (non-graphics?) logic added by Sega. I doubt IMG could release data without Sega's blessing.
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