Why did Namco cancel the PowerVR PC versions of Rave Racer, Air Combat 22 and Tekken?

[parallaxscroll]

In November 1995, Namco Ltd., the leading arcade game manufacturer, announced it will be porting games such as "Rave Racer," "Air Combat 22" and "Tekken" to PowerVR.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Compaq+selects+PowerVR+3D+graphics+architecture+fo r+next-generation,...-a018265911



PowerVR PC Rave Racer preview from Next Generation issue #19, July 1996:

http://i.imgur.com/BRQwM.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/xkI1W.jpg


I was so mad at Namco for not releasing at least RAVE RACER (not to be confused with Rage Racer on PS1) for PowerVR cards on PC. Well, and Air Combat 22 as well, but Tekken, not so much.

I drooled all over my copy of Next Generation with that Rave Racer preview!

Man....

[parallaxscroll]

No replies huh?

Does ANYONE wish to discuss this topic?

:/

[Jorpho]

Why does anything get cancelled? Most likely, someone decided there was not enough money to be made. It says right there that "a top end PC will be required", and PowerVR never took off as a 3D API, if I'm not mistaken – again, as it says right there, Direct3D kind of steamrolled everything.

Either that or maybe development was going really badly and there were too many bugs to work out.

[parallaxscroll]

Why does anything get cancelled? Most likely, someone decided there was not enough money to be made. It says right there that "a top end PC will be required", and PowerVR never took off as a 3D API, if I'm not mistaken – again, as it says right there, Direct3D kind of steamrolled everything.

Either that or maybe development was going really badly and there were too many bugs to work out.


I suppose you're right on all points. Still it's a shame though. I wish we could at least find a vid of Rave Racer on PowerVR.

[Shulamana]

That was the time period I was most into PC gaming and I've never heard of PowerVR. :|

[parallaxscroll]

That was the time period I was most into PC gaming and I've never heard of PowerVR. :|


http://www.gmkfreelogos.com/logos/P/img/PowerVR.gif

PowerVR was developed by Videologic and NEC, and was the chief rival of the 3DFX Voodoo Graphics chipset during the mid-late 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR

The second generation of PowerVR was the graphical power behind the Sega Dreamcast.

[Zing]

Anyone into 3D gaming at the time should have known about Power VR. Reading Carmack's .plan file was a must!

The likely answer is that the games likely ran slower on the hardware accelerated version. This was also a common problem with the initial Rendition Verite chipset.

From what I recall of the time, Power VR used a tile-based method of rendering, which would have required programmer education from the hardware company to get the games to an acceptable speed. Certain programming tricks which worked with GLIDE and Direct3D didn't work well with tiles.

[parallaxscroll]

Thread bump - Videos of the PC PowerVR version of Rave Racer have recently surfaced!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onZi_-Xzqyk (starts at 1:30)

also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBuGwrWP-s4

[Collector_Gaming]

Why does anything get cancelled? Most likely, someone decided there was not enough money to be made. It says right there that "a top end PC will be required", and PowerVR never took off as a 3D API, if I'm not mistaken – again, as it says right there, Direct3D kind of steamrolled everything.

Either that or maybe development was going really badly and there were too many bugs to work out.

And remember computers of that magnitude at that time were stupidly expensive!
I mean my first computer was in 1997 and i remember like it was yesterday it was 1400 dollars for a mid grade packard bell computer with monitor (remember them?) and a generic hp desk jet printer.