After a full day of presentations, demos, Q&A sessions, benchmarking (strictly under NDA), eating, drinking, racing (PowerVR driven dual arcade Ultim@te Races) and punching (Dreamcast's Virtua Fighter 3TB) with several fellow webmasters from PowerVR fan sites and the VideoLogic/NEC folks, we were left with an air of optimism. We've never doubted the PowerVR Series2 in terms of the technology involved but the delays and finally the cancellation of the originally planned 1998 PC part has meant that a PowerVR PC product hasn't been released for over two years.
Not since the PCX2 has VideoLogic/NEC played any part in the PC 3D accelerator market. Back then it was up against the much more attractive 3Dfx powered Voodoo Graphics. Nevertheless, it took second place and had a somewhat strong following, particularly in Europe. But that was then, and today's players have multiplied like rabbits and NEC/VideoLogic are now up against S3, Matrox, nVidia, 3Dlabs, Intel, ATI and, of course, still 3Dfx.
So, can the much-delayed PowerVR Series2 PC part pull NEC/VideoLogic back into the frame? Vice President of Marketing and Sales of Multimedia Technology Director, Trevor Wing certainly seems to think so, "Once the PowerVR Series2 hits the shelves we're extremely confident that it will put us back on the map." In the short-term gamers might well expect something that would blow the cotton socks off of any other chipset but it seems as though VideoLogic/NEC feels that there's still plenty of room for themselves and other companies in the 3D card market. But they certainly have a lot to make up for in terms of their reputation on the PC.
Although they claim to be the first 3D graphics company to have and ship a working .25 micron chip, (what about the similar S3 claim?) the PowerVR 2DC for Sega's Dreamcast, there's nothing a PC junkie can buy off a shelf and jam into an AGP slot to get a gander with their own peepers. Obviously the PowerVR 2DC has gone a long way to proving that deferred texturing, screen tiling and an on-chip Z function are all viable technological solutions, we're still hoping to see a similar success story on the PC. Stranger things have happened…
