Desktop Enhancements. Networking Software. Trending from CNET. Visit Site. Clicking on the Download Now Visit Site button above will open a connection to a third-party site. Full Specifications. What's new in version 5. Release August 26, Date Added January 18, Version 5.
Operating Systems. Total Downloads 15, Downloads Last Week 0. Report Software. Related Software. Some expected better 3D performance thanks to the expensive VRAM modules, but the result was opposite. The real strength was somewhere else — the dual-ported VRAM provides two bit data paths.
This allows to work in higher resolutions, with more colors and higher refresh rates. Thus, the true benefit of VRAM is visible only when the card is used with large hi-res monitors. The core was enhanced with dual screen pipelines. This happens automatically when there is not enough memory for the Z-Buffer after allocating space for color buffers.
MUX buffering works only in bit colors Z-Buffer is always bit, regardless the color depth. The last bit for each pixel tells if the stored data is a Z or color value. At the beginning of each frame, you can fill the back buffer with any color data solid color, background bitmap, previous frame…. Then the chip starts the Z-Buffer pass where it draws all polygons in just Z depth values.
Z values of new pixels are written into the back buffer if the original value is color data 2D background or if it passes the Z test against the previously stored Z value. After this pass, the back buffer contains mix of color data of the 2D background in the area of the screen, where no polygons are located and Z data of the 3D scene. ViRGE now needs to process the whole frame again. It again starts with calculating Z value for each pixel. If and only if the Z value is equal to the Z value previously stored in the back buffer in the first pass , ViRGE proceeds to calculate the final color of that pixel and overwrites the value in the back buffer with the color data.
Once the second pass is complete, the back buffer contains only color data and it is ready to be flipped into front color buffer and sent to the screen. Alpha-blending is not available with MUX buffering writing semi-transparent pixels would need both color and Z values of the previous pixel stored in video memory. You might have noticed that using one bit for telling the chip if the data is Z or color value means that the color and depth precision is decreased to 15 bits per pixel.
That is true. I am not sure about the Z-buffer, but colors look the same with and without MUX buffering. Given the heavy dithering in high-color modes on ViRGE, I assume that 15 bits per pixel are used for color data by default thus, each color component is stored in 5 bits.
I am among those who somehow like the high-color dithering on ViRGE way more than dithering on ATI cards and it is a part of my s gaming experience. The low internal color precision leads to interesting but annoying alpha-blending artifacts, where alpha-masked polygons have dithering even on pixels that should be fully transparent. Tire smoke behind the vehicles shows ugliness of the ordered grid dithering artifacts if too many alpha-blended polygons are drawn over each other Rollcage, Using it in true-color modes allows you to avoid the typical dithering artifacts and enjoy better picture quality.
This sounds strange at first, but it makes sense. ViRGE is very inefficient in memory accesses during texturing as it needs to jump in the memory a lot and it always reads just small bits of data. The memory chips spend most of the time accessing the first word from a new location, but all subsequent words are typically read with the speed of one word per chip cycle.
Also, the required bandwidth is not doubled as only the color buffer is larger. There is in fact one operating system that has support for OpenGL hardware acceleration on any ViRGE card and the driver is even bundled with the operating system. The DDK contains the whole source code of the driver excluding the mini-port part , so any hardware vendor can see how the features are implemented. You can modify the driver and compile it by yourself. To build the driver s3mvirge.
There are also a few other caveats before you get a fully working driver in a distributable form. For example, there is no.
The easier way is to combine the new dll file with any existing ViRGE driver. Only the polygons with certain unsupported blending features are rendered using CPU and then sent to framebuffer memory these polygons are drawn slower but without any graphics glitches.
The driver uses OpenGL hardware acceleration only if the desktop color depth is set to bit high-color. I found only one issue — the driver switches to the software-only mode after any color depth or resolution change happens and you need to restart the system to get the hardware acceleration back.
I still remember all those on-line discussions with people looking for an affordable OpenGL accelerator. In the first quarter of , you could buy a Matrox Millennium 1 card that supported OpenGL MCD but could not accelerate textures nor transparency effects. Its dithering artifacts on alpha-blended polygons were worse than what ViRGE produced and the bilinear texture filtering was one of the worst you could see. ViRGE has never been a good choice for GLQuake but it could have been a good cheap speed-up for 3D modeling programs in the early days of 3D acceleration.
Simple smooth-shaded triangles are drawn with the speed similar to alpha-blended ones so the speed is halved. I assume that the MCD driver does not have that good memory management and large textures are sometimes drawn using CPU. The high driver overhead causes the system to handle only about 30 thousand draw calls with MCD compared to thousand draw calls with ICD. I assume that Microsoft did not spend much time optimizing the driver and preferred it to be easy to read for other programmers.
Very impressive article! Well done! Have you looked at the S3 Trio 3D and 2X cards also? To the best of my understanding they are also based on the Virge but offer some real improvements beyond being AGP, there are two distinct variants as I remember. Anyway thank you for a very comprehensive look at these mostly ill reported cards.
It has a fantastic clean output quality and seems to be one of the best of the first Virge cards available. The output quality is superb on these. I had troubles only with my GX2, but I believe that it just needed to replace caps and the trick with changing the black level voltage using its registers. I even have one and tested it in multiple games.
From my point of view, all the ViRGE cards had some real advantages when released — even the GX2 was usable for low-end 3D gaming and was pretty good in multimedia. On the other side, the Trio3D was all about the low price. Amazing article. It is good to see those articles. You have to download and manually install it; if prerequisites are required, you will have to manually install them too. Manual installation Program is distributed as ZIP package: download to temporary directory and unpack to destination folder.
Online documentation:. Following ones are the download links for manual installation:. The installation will fail without this step. For TrueColor modes Please read this entire document to determine the required steps for your environment. This device driver automatically detects DDC monitor capabilities and adjusts the available selections to match the monitors capabilities.
If the monitor attached to the system is included on the list, which appears on page 2 of the System Properties Screen Tab, that monitor should be used, not the DDC or Default. Use the following procedure after attaching a different DDC monitor to your system. In the System Setup Folder, reset the display to the lowest refresh rate available. This will prevent the system from attempting to display at a refresh rate higher than that supported by the new monitor. Shut down your system and install the new monitor.
Restart your system. When you are instructed to do so, shut down your system and restart it. NOTE: some previous device drivers did not provide this information. Insert Diskette 1 when prompted, press F3 to display a command prompt, and then use the following instructions to reset your display mode. Restart your computer.
Simultaneously press Alt and F1 key immediately when a square block appears in the top left hand corner. Perform a shutdown and restart your computer. Proceed to Section 6. DSC 2. If it is, go to step 3. Type C: and then press Enter.
Then press Enter. See steps above. Setup will then identify your chipset. When prompted to do so, press Enter to continue. Select OK. PMI file. PMI file has not been created, the adapter will not be supported. This process can take several seconds and will black-out the screen. When the installation is complete, shut down your system, remove the diskette, and restart your computer.
When the system has restarted: a. Open the System Setup Folder. Open the System object. If your monitor has not been detected as DDC compatible, on page 2 of Screen Tab, select your display from the display list. If your display does not appear in the list, select Default. Restart your computer to ensure all refresh rate options are available. Open the System object and select page 1 of Screen Tab, as in step 7.
Select the desired screen resolution and a screen refresh rate. Close the Settings notebook or System Properties. CFG file and reboot. This will set the refresh rate to the default value. A new refresh rate can then be selected using the procedure described above.
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