NEW PowerVR Series 3 Drivers 2.2 (22.0033)

Judas · Oct 9, 2004, 04:31 PM

New Driver 2.2 BETA 1 Build 2.01.22.0033 is available to download.

Here are some links:

Windows XP Mirrors:
Windows XP 2.2 Beta 1 From PVRDEV
Windows XP 2.2 Beta 1 From PowerVR

Windows 2000 Mirrors:
Windows 2000 2.2 Beta 1 From PVRDEV
Windows 2000 2.2 Beta 1 From PowerVR

Windows 9x/ME Mirrors:
Windows 9x/ME 2.2 Beta 1 From PVRDEV
Windows 9x/ME 2.2 Beta 1 From PowerVR

Linux:
Please go >HERE<

(Linux is still currently 2.1 Build 2.01.21.0007)

gangsterant16 · Oct 9, 2004, 07:27 PM

im a newbee what r these drivers for

Judas · Oct 9, 2004, 08:54 PM

They are the Reference drivers for the entire Series 3 (referred to as Kyro 1 and 2 along with the rare 2 SE by STMicro, one of the largest Chip Manufacturer in the world) PowerVR Graphics chips

These include such cards as:

Hercules Series 3 line of cards:

RARE~ 3D Prophet 4800 64Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 2 SE & Focus TV chip)

3D Prophet 4500 64Mb AGP (Kyro 2)
3D Prophet 4500 64Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 2)
3D Prophet 4500 32Mb AGP (Kyro 2)
3D Prophet 4500 32Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 2)
3D Prophet 4000XT 64Mb AGP (Kyro 1)
3D Prophet 4000XT 64Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 1)
3D Prophet 4000XT 64Mb PCI (Kyro 1)
3D Prophet 4000XT 32Mb AGP (Kyro 1)
3D Prophet 4000XT 32Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 1)
3D Prophet 4000XT 32Mb AGP PCI (Kyro 1)

PowerColor Brought a similare line of cards as above dubbed "Evil Kryo etc.)"

so did Apollo, and various other companies... Major Company with DIRECT connections to PowerVR is Imagination Technologies which Pure Digital (Previously called VideoLogic) created the Vivid line of kyro cards

I used Hercules as a base AS they have probably the largest and most amount of kyro cards out there was was probably the most known.

There is ONE company still spitting out kyro cards and using them for professional use... alot of people have probably seen them in action but never knew it.... I'm still searching for the website.. i just haven't come across it... they were not used to gaming at all...

The uniqueness of the PowerVR technology with graphics is the fact that they are nothing like any other graphics card..... they are not IMG...

they simply render completely differently...

All video cards aside from PowerVR's, render the entire scene, including the crap you can't and will never see. 2-3 maybe 4 years ago, the most overdraw (extra polygons/textures/objects that you don't see, if you will) was approximately 3-4 TIMES that of what was made visable...

Basically, all the video cards on the market were doing 3-5 times the work it DIDN'T need to do in the first place.... and the only way to push through it was to push the core and memory to high speeds and invent technologies that would cut a bit of the workload of such as Hyper Z or whatnot. These helped, but in no way meet up with what PowerVR had to offer...

PowerVR's technology is refered to as Deffered Rendering, or mostly known to as Tile Based Rendering. It splits the screen up in a even number of tiles which it can digest and figure out what can and cannot be seen BEFORE anything is done with it, before it starts using up any resources/bandwidth or anything. It's intelligent...

Aside from probably screwing up all the details and mixing you up... take a good gander or search through google for info on the Kyro 2 (alot of reviews ALTHOUGH OLD and somewhat incorrect as they were using reference boards and beta drivers) try searching for Tile Based Rendering or Defered Rendering

Here's an example site that i found to be pretty easy to read and presented some rather good/ old and outdate results... but good. (ALL bugs reported in the review have been since repaired.. ANY to top it off, every game listed has had MASSIVE preformance increases as well)

Skip through some of the stuff you don't understand or care about... it's a well written review/article

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1435

deviantchild · Oct 13, 2004, 06:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Judas

There is ONE company still spitting out kyro cards and using them for professional use... alot of people have probably seen them in action but never knew it.... I'm still searching for the website.. i just haven't come across it... they were not used to gaming at all...

http://www.imaginegraphics.co.uk/

more specifically...

http://www.imaginegraphics.co.uk/pro...xelperfect.htm

though it appears that it's been recently superceded by an S3 DeltaChrome based product!

mkk · Oct 13, 2004, 11:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by deviantchild

though it appears that it's been recently superceded by an S3 DeltaChrome based product!

Agh, that hurts.

Nice to see some Kyro's still kicking anyhow.

Judas · Oct 16, 2004, 11:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by deviantchild

http://www.imaginegraphics.co.uk/

more specifically...

http://www.imaginegraphics.co.uk/pro...xelperfect.htm

though it appears that it's been recently superceded by an S3 DeltaChrome based product!

*waves*

it's not serprising... the most likely lack of Chips, they would HAVE to oventually move on....

amuro · Nov 20, 2004, 06:23 AM

Although I do not own a PowerVR based graphics card for the PC, I was introduced to the power of PowerVR2's Tile based rendering with the SEGA Dreamcast so I can back up that the PowerVR is really a powerfull chip, even though the ATI 8500 and up have improved as far as power is concerned.

I wanted to post a link so that anyone could see some screenshots of SEGA's PowerVR2 based NAOMI arcade boards and the NAOMI 2 that uses dual PowerVR2+a Geometry co-processor for transform and lighting code named "Elan" along with 32MB system ram, 32MB video ram and 8MB sound ram. If you ever see Virtua Fighter 4 at a local to you arcade you will be able to see what I mean.

http://www.system16.com/sega/index.html

Aside from that, SEGA is planning to use a PowerVR based GPU in their up comming NAOMI 3 arcade hardware but there are no technical details yet.

Also whenever this GPU is released (prolly Dx10 hardware compliant) I hope that this will help them make a strong comeback to basically wreck havoc on the current default champs in the video card realm.

rushko · Dec 6, 2004, 07:19 PM

I was happy owner of 3D Prophet 4000XT 64Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 1), it was excellent card and chip thou, it had lots of excellent features besides tile based renderin, also it was faster in quake3 than GF2MX. It a shame STM stopped it all

I hope theguys at PVR TECH will continue their work anyway

Judas · Dec 7, 2004, 12:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rushko

I was happy owner of 3D Prophet 4000XT 64Mb AGP TV-Out (Kyro 1), it was excellent card and chip thou, it had lots of excellent features besides tile based renderin, also it was faster in quake3 than GF2MX. It a shame STM stopped it all

I hope theguys at PVR TECH will continue their work anyway

oh they have.... don't you worry... PVR simply liecensed it out to ST... doesn't mean ST owns PVR at all...

PVR lives while scrapping the series 4 project.. and apparently selling the series 5 liecence to Sega.... so expect some pretty amazing arcade machines to show up

currently PVR is touting it's MBR... mobile graphics.... producing some really really excellent set of graphics without being so costly

~~Vasot~~ · Dec 11, 2004, 06:28 AM

Their drivers still sucks

Judas · Dec 11, 2004, 04:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vasot

Their drivers still sucks

?

simply just stating something that has no merits at all, why do they suck?...

the first few driver sets released in the 7.xxx-8.xxx days were rather brutal..... the 9.xxx drivers were the start of something excellent.... the 14 and 15 drivers were top notch..

Personally, at the time, they are better drivers then nvidia supplied.. and better then ATI at the time

~~Vasot~~ · Dec 12, 2004, 05:03 AM

They have better drivers from Nvidia and ATi ??

Duh !!!
I hope you are not a PowerVR fanatic just claiming........or maybe you work for them

Because if in the reality had as good drivers as Nvidia and ATI they would not be at the LAST PLACE of the costumers buy and they wouldn't had as bad sales as they have right now (IN THE PC MARKET NOT CONSOLES)

Yea with 10000 Lockups or strange behaviour in most of the games out there

They remind Volaris driver technology

Not mention that there is almost no Game Company and game that official supports PowerVR
Nothing guarantees that games will work as they suppose should work

90% of the games out there are support and tested only ATI and Nvidia technology and some in Matrox but that's all....

Sorry man but PowerVR drivers are bad and mostly unsupported (they are not the worst of course but...) and until they do something about it, costumers will continue prefer buying only Nvidia and ATI sollutions

From the Hardware view i surely like PowerVR

but they have still a lot to learn about creating Great drivers

~~HawK~~ · Dec 12, 2004, 06:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vasot

Because if in the reality had as good drivers as Nvidia and ATI they would not be at the LAST PLACE of the costumers buy and they wouldn't had as bad sales as they have right now

You really havent a clue, do you

Judas · Dec 12, 2004, 01:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HawK

You really havent a clue, do you

i'd really have to agree there..

Vasot.... firstly, you must be stuck on the old Series 2 technology requiring a specific API to be designed to use the PVR technology.... and back then.... drivers were bad, results were poor, image quality was excellent only in the case of the games working...

When Series 3 came into the light, it all changed.... No longer did they require specific game code made, nor an API.... The only problems that EVER occured was due to the lazy design of the games, usually UBI Soft or EA games would have pretty terrible results..

Really, i should show you some screenshots that clearly beats out the image quality of ATI giving better preformance... in the case of being a compariable card if not a little more powerful....

The kyro 2, Hercules 4500 64mb solution was the budget card to have... and millions were sold in europe. The only thing sad was the result in North America due to the most likely BAD taste from the previous series... but there were still plenty sold then....

Lockups? meh, i never had them, anyone that did had either a conflict or something silly set in the bios.... always able to fix it enless the card was a dud.... i'm still impressed with the total outcome as the number of complaints were extremely low...

More about there drivers,

PowerVR's drivers were the first to include a Full blown and WORKING specific application configuration management system. Allowing you to set anything you could want for any application you want. Unlike ATI's own profiling system that was recently introduced.... it worked...

Want any additional info?

Read through that rather achient review at the bottom of my second post, then consider the fact that they did that review with hardware that wasn't officially released yet, and on drivers that were still maturing..... imagine less then 6 months later, every issue that they mention is resolved and massive preformance improvements...

I can safely say, when i had a hercules 4500, i could easily on mostly any occasion, pass up a Geforce 2 Ulta or GTS..... Beat out any ATI card in image quality, and still find myself on a card that saposedly had anywere from 1/2 to 1/4 the power to do it.

rushko · Dec 19, 2004, 06:21 PM

I can only confirm that the PVR drivers were very stable and good, even better than nVidia's and ATI's, better in term of stabillity of course and they were very easy to use also. They even let me experiment with most of the settings to get the best performance out of the games which I can't say for nVidia's or ATI's drvs. When I first bought ATI card(after Hercules 4000XT) I was dissapointed with the drvs settings, I could not manipulate with it so easy as with PVR's drivers. It's a pitty PVR didn't make to kyro3 or even kyro5, the graphics card market would be abetter place.