PowerVR's New Weaponry Unveiled

NEC and VideoLogic on Monday announced their next leap into the graphics market with the second generation PowerVR technology that appears to be squarely aimed at their biggest competitor, 3Dfx.

Rather than concentrate on the PC gaming market, NEC's new focus pushes into arcades, set-top boxes, and console systems. Although NEC representatives won't say much about the console deals, Sega's next console system appears to be what NEC means.

GameSpot News met with Charles Bellfield, product marketing manager for PowerVR, who showed us an early version of the chip running at half power. He also elaborated on what the new chip can do and how it will better the current chip, the PCX2. What he showed us was impressive.

Impact On PCs: One thing that Bellfield stressed was that NEC has been working closely with Microsoft to make sure that PowerVR is completely compatible with DirectX 6.0 when it releases, so much so that NEC has people working at Microsoft's campus.

PowerVR will also be OpenGL-compatible - and not just with the limited OpenGL set in Quake and Quake II but fully compatible with OpenGL.

Since Microsoft is working closely on a partial unification of its own DirectX technology and Silicon Graphics' OpenGL in the Fahrenheit project, we expect many other chip developers will begin to make claims like this.

Some of the strategies that NEC is looking at in the second coming are much like the ones that its competitors have used to gain market share. First, it is focusing on doing more and more of the gaming computations on the PowerVR chip instead of forcing a user to upgrade his PC.

This makes it so gamers get high-end performance without having to worry about having a measly Pentium 100 when everyone else on the block has Pentium II powerhouses.

Secondly, NEC is trying to make it easier to program for the chip. Most offer special API (application programming language) that is specific only to one chip. For developers of games, this can make a game harder to program if it hopes to support more than one chipset. Additional PowerVR support will be part of the solution, and making sure programmers get updated is sure to gain NEC some friends in the development community. Thirdly, much like the current chip, pricing for the chip is set to be at a lower price point making it cheaper for more people to pick up a 2D/3D card for less cost.

Why should people listen? NEC appears to have done some soul searching since the launch of the PCX2 and has tweaked the architecture of the chip. The new chip will run five times faster than the first offering with more than one million polygons a second and a fill rate of more the 120 Mpix/sec. It has also upped the ante with a 1600x1200 24-bit true color resolution, full scene antialiasing, spectacular highlights (this makes light reflect off surfaces like autos), bump mapping (a feature that has gotten a lot of talk, considering it will be one of the features in id's next game code-named Trinity), anisotropic filtering, supersampling, special effect volumes (shadows and other neat tricks), and a fog table (the current version of the PCX2 is lacking this feature).

PCI and AGP (including 2.0 and AGP sideband) support are also standard. NEC's technology works differently than other 3D architectures, rather than having the chip draw polygons that you don't see, it only renders the parts of objects you do see. NEC claims that is more efficient than how its competition does rendering because it speeds up the process with less memory - so much so that the new chip set has no Z-buffering because it does all the processing in real time (since there is basically only one visible plane there isn't as much of a need for computing depth).

The technology also renders to screen in tiles. Think of it this way: Rather than draw a bunch of 3D images on top of one another, imagine drawing everything on graph paper. If you just color in certain squares, without getting into the process of drawing all the depths of 3D objects, it in theory becomes easier to draw. And this is what the PowerVR does.

If you don't really know what many of the terms mean, you'll soon be able to see what it produces. In a demo of Ultim@te Race, you could see where the technology has improved from the current PowerVR chip.

Bellfield also said that the chip will have a name that will set it apart from what the industry calls the second generation of the PCX2 but couldn't comment on what that name might be.

In another demo, with Incoming, we got to see that the chip runs great with high resolution. Great color depth and smoke from the smoking guns really made for an impressive demo.

NEC looks like it has a much bigger stake in the 3D market with this chipset. During the demo, Bellfield reminded us that the chip was only running at half speed with unoptimized drivers on a Pentium II 266.

So when do gamers get to take a look? NEC said that it should have the new chip products within the next 12 months.

Impact On Consoles: Although Bellfield wouldn't say much about the Sega/NEC dealings (his lips were sealed so much that he wouldn't even say the word Sega), a close working relationship with Microsoft and DirectX technologies also paves the way for a special version of Microsoft's mini-OS Windows CE.

Rumors about Sega's move to using Windows CE (currently only available on PDAs) and NEC's PowerVR chipset as a graphics subsystem are starting to fill in the pieces of the puzzle on what's next in the console market. Plus, Bellfield did say that NEC is working on Microsoft's campus.

Impact On Arcades: A new realm for PowerVR is the arcade. Partly with Intel's Open Arcade initiative, NEC hopes to make the chipset available for those building new arcade boxes using Intel's specifications and Pentium II. But NEC also is focusing on the regular arcade boxes so that developers can cut the total cost of a specialized title in the arcade.

In an example, he pointed to Midway's Blitz arcade machine that was sitting in the room that we spoke in and said that what they're aiming for is taking a machine that could cost US$30,000 and bringing it down in price significantly. Blitz runs on chips made by its competitor, 3Dfx. Since cost is definitely the bottom line in the gaming business, this could earn many followers looking for a cheaper way to get their customers to buy more machines at less cost.