PowerVR Racer Demo

**Chris Leckness** · 03-18-05, 02:03 AM

X50v Graphic Demos

PowerVR, a division of Imagination Technologies, develops and licenses graphics, video and display technologies. They are the company that designed the Intel's 2700G graphics co-processor.

Here is a LINK that shows has some demos for use on the Axim X50v.

"PowerVR Racer is a high-speed, white-knuckle car race demo with contestants battling through an entire city. Racers tear downtown into the industrial quarter and the mountains beyond, then back through the sleepy suburbs to the commercial district.
Although this is a 'canned' demo with no interaction, significant game-like code is executed, with banking, braking and suspension being simulated in real-time by the CPU, and executed entirely with fixed-point arithmetic. The city database is modelled with over 20,000 triangles, and the cars are modelled with multiple levels of detail, with 1,500 triangles in the most detailed version.

Accurate reflection-mapping and multi-texturing is used on the cars, PVR-TC 4-bit texture compression is used throughout."

**Chris Leckness** · 03-18-05, 02:04 AM

This is probaly old news, but it was brought up in the forums earlier tonight.

03-18-05, 07:33 AM

Wow, let somebody please make a game of this :)

03-18-05, 01:12 PM

No kidding, those are great looking

Really shows what is possible and why the X50v is really the ultimate graphics ppc

wmm · 03-18-05, 06:42 PM

Hmm, something funny is going on. When I first started the demo, I couldn't believe people were going "ooh" and "ahh" over something so choppy. I was getting maybe 1.8 fps. Then the scenery changed to outside the city -- rolling past the waterfall through the long cut in the rocks and through the tunnel -- and there I was seeing smooth animation. As soon as it cycles around so I have a car in the frame, though, it drops right back down to under 2 fps again. Futhermore, the car changes every frame -- is that supposed to happen? It looks like a different car (or maybe just a different paint job) every frame (twice a second). Then as soon as I get back to the waterfall it starts running smoothly again. What gives?

Theophilus · 03-18-05, 07:20 PM

I had exactly the same thing happening !

And what is even stranger is that now, when I run it, it works perfectly, without this problem (I'm now making the same "ooh" and "ahh" as everyone else) It's weird because I didn't change anything tothe config, and I can't get it like it was the first 2 or 3 times I ran it (choppy, and cars colors changing all the time, as if the textures weren't properly loaded)

At first I thought it was linked to a compatibility problem with the Enhanced GAPI driver, but changing the settings doesn't appear to change anything...

Well, anyway this is really a killer demo when it works ;)

FallN · 03-19-05, 12:00 AM

Choppy or not, it looks promising no less. :)

wmm · 03-19-05, 04:14 PM

Originally Posted by Theophilus

At first I thought it was linked to a compatibility problem with the Enhanced GAPI driver, but changing the settings doesn't appear to change anything...

That's definitely not it, as I don't have that installed on my unit (I'm not a gamer, I was just looking for a cool demo to show people).

Maybe I'll try again and see if I can get it to run smoothly the whole way through. Thanks for the info.

howesey · 03-19-05, 10:20 PM

All those demo's run lovely and smooth here. No 'choppy' rendering at all.

rsmith4321 · 03-20-05, 04:22 PM

Yes, the demo is very smooth on my unit, no problems like mentioned.

KristofBeets · 03-21-05, 08:01 AM

OK, what can happen is that your Axim has a lot of junk in memory e.g. apps running in the background which use a lot of memory. If PowerVR Racer or any other demo runs choppy and has maybe corrupted textures do a soft reset of your axim and things should be ok. One possible cause of this issue is when a video player is active in the background (this reserves a large chunk of memory).

Hope this helps,

K-

Theophilus · 03-21-05, 08:21 AM

Originally Posted by KristofBeets

OK, what can happen is that your Axim has a lot of junk in memory e.g. apps running in the background which use a lot of memory. If PowerVR Racer or any other demo runs choppy and has maybe corrupted textures do a soft reset of your axim and things should be ok. One possible cause of this issue is when a video player is active in the background (this reserves a large chunk of memory).

Hope this helps,

K-

This was, of course, the first thing I tried. But it didn't work.
How much memory does this demo use ? It was choppy even with about 20Mb free program memory (which seems more than enough for any PPC program). But like I said, it did that 2 or 3 times, and after that it worked perfectly, even when I had far less than 20Mb available. I dont know why.

irwin2 · 03-21-05, 12:32 PM

i have 14mb memory left and demo runs ultra smooth (about 30-50fps)

wmm · 03-21-05, 01:59 PM

Originally Posted by KristofBeets

OK, what can happen is that your Axim has a lot of junk in memory e.g. apps running in the background which use a lot of memory. If PowerVR Racer or any other demo runs choppy and has maybe corrupted textures do a soft reset of your axim and things should be ok. One possible cause of this issue is when a video player is active in the background (this reserves a large chunk of memory).

Hope this helps,

K-

I did that; as a matter of fact, the demo wouldn't run at all (never started) until after I did the soft reset to clear out the fragged memory.

I haven't gotten around to trying it again, but it's still in my download directory, so I'll probably get back to it sometime.

06-19-06, 06:39 PM

The PowerVR Racer demo still has corrupted textures for me on my X51v...and it's only for certain parts of the track. When the textures are corrupted, everything goes all choppy.

Anybody know of a solution? I wanna be able to show this off..