internal 24-bit color precision rendering was notable for the time. The single-chip PCX1 was released in retail as the VideoLogic Apocalypse 3D and featured an improved architecture with more texture memory, ensuring better game compatibility. This was followed by the further refined PCX2, which clocked 6 MHz higher, offloaded some driver work by including more chip functionality and added bilinear filtering, and was released in retail on the Matrox M3D and Videologic Apocalypse 3Dx cards. There was also the Videologic Apocalypse 5D Sonic, which combined the PCX2 accelerator with a Tseng ET6100 2D core and ESS Agogo sound on a single PCI board. The PowerVR PCX cards were placed in the market as budget products and performed well in the games of their time, but weren't quite as fully featured as the 3DFX Voodoo accelerators (due to certain blending modes being unavailable, for instance). However, the PowerVR approach of rendering to the 2D card's memory meant that much higher 3D rendering resolutions could be possible in theory, especially with PowerSGL games that took full advantage of the hardware. All models support DirectX 3.0 and PowerSGL, MiniGL drivers available for select games 1 Texture mapping units: render output units 2 Midas3 is 3-chip (vs. single-chip PCX series) and uses a split memory architecture: 1 MB 32-bit SDRAM (240 MB/s peak bandwidth) for textures and 1 MB 16-bit FPM DRAM for geometry data (and presumably for PCI communication). PCX series has only texture memory. Series2 (NEC) The second generation PowerVR2 ("PowerVR Series2", chip codename "CLX2") was brought to market in the Dreamcast console between 1998 and 2001. As part of an internal competition at Sega to design the successor to the Saturn, the PowerVR2 was licensed to NEC and was chosen ahead of a rival design based on the 3dfx Voodoo2. It was called "the Highlander Project" during development. The PowerVR2 was paired with the Hitachi SH-4 in the Dreamcast, with the SH-4 as the T&L geometry engine and the PowerVR2 as the rendering engine. The PowerVR2 also powered the Sega Naomi, the upgraded arcade system board counterpart of the Dreamcast. However, the success of the Dreamcast meant that the PC variant, sold as Neon 250, appeared a year late to the market, in late 1999. The Neon 250 was nevertheless competitive with the RIVA TNT2 and Voodoo3. The Neon 250 features inferior hardware specifications compared to the PowerVR2 part used in