1. Technology: Tile rendering appears to be working (you may have heard a bit about Dreamcast), so even if the PC product completely flops (for whatever reason), we won't be attending a VideoLogic funeral anytime soon.
2. Games: Sega will sell a whole heap of Deamcast consoles and game developers will continue to brave the PowerVR unorthodox architecture to be included.
3. Performance: The PVRS2 PC products will actually gain a performance advantage by being delayed. The higher processor speeds that will be available at launch will have improved their specs without any change in the design.
4. Patents: VideoLogic owns several patents for this technology. Should it get up and run, it could pay off nicely in the licensing department.
Not nearly enough? Well then, here is the whole tale in all of its actual complexity…
To start off telling it from the other side of the pond, last spring at CeBIT, a certain fishy fellow was wowed by the PowerVR Second Generation "ARC 1" 3D only, .35 micron, 66Mhz technology demo and blabbed about it on an Internet radio show. The ensuing 3Dfx stock price drop was registered as a coincidence and probably it was. Who the heck cares what some poncy (and likely hungover) 24 year old web journalist at a trade show thinks about tomorrow's game technology?
Answer: shareholders, silly! Though we like to think our sites are primarily for gamers and game developers, there are more than a few investors out there reading about Space Bunnies and smoking the Frag Pipe just to get an edge on deciding which stocks to buy. Anyhow, fish also thrashed out an uncredited Next Generation Online article about PVRSG to pay his mounting Internet phone bill.
His enthusiasm was quite understandable, considering that Sega had dumped 3Dfx in favor of PVRSG for the Dreamcast console product, the PVRSG ("Naomi") arcade part was reportedly on track and the PC product was in a "showable" form as his own eyeballs had told him. The PVRSG PC sample boards were expected for summer '98 and looked to compare favorably to the Voodoo2, at least on paper. Check out the PowerVR Series 2 presentation at the Computer Game Developer Conference in May where John Smith, Developer Relations Manager, PowerVR Multimedia SBU for NEC Electronics said:
"The PC 2D/3D product will be available by summer '98 with development systems available by E3"
