This past week, along side the mayhem that is E3, the Sharky Extreme lab played host to none other than the likes of VideoLogic and their latest offering, the PowerVR Neon 250 2D/3D accelerator card.

With a gestation period more along the lines of an Elephant's than the industry-standard 6 month product cycle would ever allow, the arrival of the Neon 250 has not been an easy one. Publicly shown for the first time in March at CeBIT '99 and benchmarked at tradeshows by several people, the performance of the Neon 250 has been a source of much speculation.

In fact, the whole existence of the PowerVR Series 2 PC product has been the source of much speculation. Based on the PowerVR 250 chip designed by NEC and VideoLogic, the Neon 250 has taken a back seat to the other PowerVR Series2 chips used in Sega's Dreamcast console, the Sega Naomi arcade system and on the R-Cade Vision 250 from VideoLogic for the ArcadePC platform. Finally, the baby emerges from the bath water.

The PowerVR Series 2 technology is, in a nutshell, an enhanced version of the original PowerVR 3D architecture (PCX1 and PCX2 3D graphics chips). The performance increase involved is roughly five times that of a PCX2, with a fill rate of two times PCX2. It's been TWO LONG years since VideoLogic released their last chip. The PCX1 came out in November 1996 when the best CPU one could muster was a Pentium 166MHz (yes even without MMX!) and the PCX2 followed in June 1997. The original architecture caved in due to CPU dependency but with higher performance CPUs now being the norm, that bottleneck has vanished.