Another 3D accelerator/arcade union

[Dave Glue]

This 3D accelerator may not be new to some (such as those that keep up
to things on Tommy N' Biffs 3D accelerator page, Dimension 3D- what's
the web address? Learn to do a search, dammit!), but the union
between this processor and Namco may be interesting, along with
comments (although coming from PR folks, so take caution) about it's
performance.

From Next Generation, Jan 30 1996:

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NEC and VideoLogic Enter 3D Warzone

The battle to gain control of the burgeoning graphics acceleration
market on the PC is hotting up.

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Following the arrival of Diamond's Edge card incorporating the Nvidia
chip and bundled Sega software, NEC and VideoLogic are now set to
announce the release date and full specifications of their PowerVR
chip, a scalable high-spec 3D acceleration system.

PowerVR provides fast rendering with the now required selection of 3D
effects: Gouraud Shading, true-color modes, rotation and scaling. The
unique thing about it though is the way it goes about creating such
effects.

Trevor Wing, group marketing director, said: "There are some special
things about the architecture that are unique to PowerVR. We use what
we call a reduced level of architecture which means we eliminate the
z-buffer and all the memory hassles associated with it.

However we do have a 32-bit accurate z-buffer function so we forfeit
none of its capabilities. Also, because we use an infinite plane-based
algorithm - which is different to those used by other chips - we don't
need to have anything near the access to the texture memory. This
means that our performance is a lot higher. In fact pick a given
performance point and we'll be cheaper because we're not carrying the
memory. We'll double the performance of others."

Nevertheless, all companies producing graphics hardware realise that
no matter how marvellous a chip may be internally, it will get nowhere
without some great software. nVidia has benefited immensely from the
involvement of Sega with the Edge card, a near-perfect port of Virtua
Fighter Remix could only have helped in their quest to initialise a
world standard in graphics add-ons.

However, the PowerVR system will get a similarly powerful ally given
that Namco and NEC have already announced their alliance. Rave Racer,
Tekken and Air Combat 22 are all now complete and ready for release in
May for the PowerVR system. VideoLogic claims that these conversions
are not only faithful to their arcade predecessors, they actually
surpass them. "If you take arcade Rave Racer and make it a little more
solid and a little faster the you've got the idea. It's better than
the arcade version."