Rage XL is probably the fastest card that can still use ATi's proprietary CIF renderer, though it may need special drivers from Gona's website for some games.

I briefly tried the CIF version of Tomb Raider on my Rage XL, and it ran fairly well at 800x600 with 24-bit color depth.

Was the Rage XL able to overclock a bit given the new process? Anyway not a bad solution while very late to be considered a real consumer choice.

386SX wrote on 2024-01-19, 19:55:

Was the Rage XL able to overclock a bit given the new process? Anyway not a bad solution while very late to be considered a real consumer choice.

There was post about this back a little ways, you might find it a good read. Chinese Rage XL PCI mods, improved compatibility and looking for a good overclock.

leileilol wrote on 2024-01-17, 09:01:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-01-17, 06:30:

3Dfx and PoweVR had texture compression before S3TC.

S3TC was 1998. Then, 3dfx had a very unused YUV422 format (SGI legacy baggage), and PowerVR had a broken implementation of RGB332 and I don't think they compare to what S3TC had brought. They also both had hard 256x256 texture limits so they can't do the big 512/1024 textures that S3TC normalized either.

Are you absolutely sure about this?

I’m not sure how other PowerVR products do things, but AFAIK the Dreamcast is perfectly capable of compressing 512 / 1024 texture sizes.

DC’s VQTC can even compress palette textures, which I don’t think it’s possible with S3TC?

November 1998 (DC JPN)/September 1999 (DC US/Neon 250)'s well after June 1998. PowerVR1 had no implied texture compression.

Hornet13 wrote on 2024-04-27, 16:09:

DC’s VQTC can even compress palette textures, which I don’t think it’s possible with S3TC?

how are rgb565/ argb1555 / argb4444 paletted formats? Furthermore the official PVR PS plugin doesn't support indexed colors. Even if there were actual lossy VQ compression applied to indexed color, it'd look very ugly with blocky miscolored ringing, and stripey.

Ah OK, yes, PVR1 was 1996 tech. I thought you were talking about PVR2.

I can only assume that Neon 250 inherited VQTC from Dreamcast, with the possible exception of palette texture compression (which wouldn’t really be needed much on PC anyway).

leileilol wrote on 2024-04-27, 18:04:

how are rgb565/ argb1555 / argb4444 paletted formats? Furthermore the official PVR PS plugin doesn't support indexed colors. Even if there were actual lossy VQ compression applied to indexed color, it'd look very ugly with blocky miscolored ringing, and stripey.

Based on what I’ve seen from homebrew devs, my understanding is that DC’s VQTC can compress both RGB (16-bit) and paletted formats (8-bit as well as 4-bit). 512 x 512 / 1024x1024 textures can be compressed, rectangular textures can also be compressed. The size of a VQ compressed texture on DC is always 1/8 the size of an uncompressed one of the same format + the codebook overhead (which is typically 2kB but can be lowered, if needed, at the cost of texture quality).

This seems very useful given that RAM is always a precious resource on home consoles. Even more so on a TBDR machine where you also need room for a "scene buffer".

Hornet13 wrote on 2024-04-28, 06:28:

, rectangular textures can also be compressed.

I have never seen a rectangle VQ either - only squares ever. When the PVR plugin saves a non-square texture, VQ compression isn't available. ( When Quake3 was ported, all the tall textures got chopped up into square 256's, for example.)

Maybe you're confusing about non-VQ texture formats that can be used *in tandem* with VQ.

Dreamcast homebrew devs were surprised by this too. But yes, apparently, even non-square textures can be compressed.

However, this seems to come with a caveat (i.e. incompatibility with mip-mapping). Essentially, a rectangular texture with mip-maps can not be compressed. On the other hand, a rectangular texture without mip-maps can be compressed. The Neon 250 might behave in a similar manner.

leileilol wrote on 2024-04-29, 00:55:

Maybe you're confusing about non-VQ texture formats that can be used *in tandem* with VQ.

Here’s a post from TapamN (the go-to homebrew dev for DC-related info) describing things in more detail. There’s also a performance metric where he experiments with different rendering configurations (including using compressed palette textures).
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/yes-but-ho … 13#post-2307979

Neat! I think it's also really important to keep in mind just how different Neon 250 was from the hardware in the Dreamcast (CLX2? I'm awful with codenames that far back).

Similar topic here and it also has GTA VC @ 8MB
GTA3 + 8MB vram (registry hack)?