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Antworld Demo by Stel Michael. Here is an example of really advanced real-time dynamic shadows running on a 1996 3D card/GPU; the NEC PC 3DEngine card (using an NEC PCX1/Midas4 chip). Shadow volumes are used for the real-time lighting on certain objects (such as the majestic giant ants) in the demo, including self-shadowing and shadow projection from objects onto another object. Now, don’t get me wrong, I realize that the self-shadowing on the giant ant is probably just the result of each leg and body part acting like a separate object in the scene and as such each of the body part shadows are projecting onto the ant robot’s other parts as opposed to the whole ant acting as one unified model that casts one bigger volume across itself and other surfaces, but it still looks quite nice despite the brute-force approach being used. The shadows are NOT done with a stencil buffer but are rather a part of the depth cueing process on the ISP of the PCX1. This was long before games like Deus Ex: Invisible War, The Chronicles of Riddick and Doom 3 popularized the use of shadow volumes via stencil shadows (another type of shadow volume).

This demo dates back to at least mid-1996 (file creation date on the Videologic Apocalypse 3D driver CD indicates it was compiled in July 1996), around the time when the very first PowerVR card (the Midas3) was being sold installed in Compaq Presario 8000 series computers.

Here are the specifications for the computer used in this footage:
- Dell OptiPlex GXPro case and motherboard (manufactured in July 1996)
- Intel 440FX chipset
- Intel Pentium Pro 200 Mhz (256KB L2 cache) processor
- S3 Trio64V+ (2MB) video card
- NEC PC 3DEngine (NEC PowerVR PCX1) accelerator card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT3900) sound card
- 256 MBs of EDO DRAM/memory
- Microsoft Windows 95 (Japanese OSR 2.1 OEM) operating system

I’m using the Microsoft Sidewinder game controller (that came bundled with my NEC PC 3DEngine) to control the demo. Mouse and keyboard won’t work for this demo, it requires that a gameport joystick (or gamepad) be connected for it to work correctly.

Drivers used for the NEC PC 3DEngine card: version 1.0.0c1 (from the original NEC PC 3DEngine driver CD).
Drivers used for the S3 Trio64V+ card: Default Win95 OSR 2.1 drivers.
The "game" uses the SGL (Super Graphics Library) API for native PowerVR 3D acceleration.

0:00 - Shadows turned off
1:36 - Shadows turned on

In late 1996, Videologic and NEC together produced and released the first commercially available PowerVR 3D accelerator card (not counting the Midas3 installed/bundled in Compaq Presario 8000 series computers); the NEC PC3DEngine, powered by the Videologic-licensed and NEC-manufactured PCX1 (codenamed Midas4) chip/IC. The PCX1 was a chip ahead of its time in some ways and gravely misunderstood at the time due to its lack of bi-linear filtering and need for a somewhat faster processor to perform at an adequate level in contrast to other 3D accelerators of the time (although that would depend on how any given game was coded). 24-bit color depth and very impressive shadow volume effects were possible thanks to the nature of the PCX1's depth cueing (hidden-surface removal) hardware and tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR), making it possible to get said visual benefits at a negligible performance cost. Despite lacking bi-linear texture filtering, mip-mapping is still accounted for to reduce visual artifacts at a distance. The PCX1 ran at its best using the SGL API developed for the PowerVR Series 1 cards (Series 2 being the CLX2 as used in the Sega Dreamcast).

#computerhistory #windows95 #powervr #datapath #visionrgb