I guess at this point I just need people's opinions on which combination will be best for development purposes.

uA1-C + integrated Radeon 7000 ( drivers available now? )

uA1-C + PCI Radeon 9200 ( drivers available soon? )

A1-XE G4 + Radeon 9800 ( drivers available soon? )

Thoughts? Comments? Concerns? Any upcoming hardware that may be a better choice?

@PolygonSoup

Personally, I'd recommend you go for the µA1C, as its the best functioning board, and its available !

also, the Radeon7k and CMI8738 are regarded as minimum config, so if it works ok on those (from an audience perspective) you'll be alright.

besides, those boards are TINY and CRAMMED with stuff !

I have an XE, but I'm lucky enough to have a fully functioning USB port, and dont use the Ethernet port, so no DMA problems there. IIRC ethernet works properly with UDMA on the µA1C. (ps µ is easy in IE5 - just type 230 from the keypad, while holding Alt down )

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@PolygonSoup

i would say CarpeDiEm

grab what you can now and start getting fammiliar with the Amiga and its new hw and OS, you have the base hw with that (µa1 C) and well i think thats a good starting point.

Eventually there will come a Cpu module (according to diffrent shops , we have yet to see a official statement) which is rumored to be around 1.4ghz or higher (i only read this in a thread here on AW so dont kill me if im wrong ).

Also the new hw , the new AmigaOne's thats comming....well we have yet to see the µa1 I model so i dont think (my humble opinion) we should expect the XC anytime soon (the XC is supposedly to be an souped up A1 with faster mem and busses) .

All in all i'd say get an µa1 C now or a used A1XE and jump on the development wagon right away and that way you will know what to expect from the next hw to come and from there decide if you should upgrade right away or not.

oh and btw to AW , enjoy your stay.

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@Agafaster

Quote:

Personally, I'd recommend you go for the µA1C, as its the best functioning board, and its available ! also, the Radeon7k and CMI8738 are regarded as minimum config, so if it works ok on those (from an audience perspective) you'll be alright.

I did just that when I bought into the G5 platform.. minimum spec 1.6 with a little extra video card beef and memory.

Quote:

I have an XE, but I'm lucky enough to have a fully functioning USB port, and dont use the Ethernet port, so no DMA problems there. IIRC ethernet works properly with UDMA on the µA1C. (ps µ is easy in IE5 - just type 230 from the keypad, while holding Alt down )

That's what I was reading about. Not particularly scary given my development interested but something to be concerned about nonetheless.

Another solution for the proper µ character.. cut and paste, heh. But thanks for the tip!

@Toaks

Quote:

i would say CarpeDiEm grab what you can now and start getting fammiliar with the Amiga and its new hw and OS, you have the base hw with that (µa1 C) and well i think thats a good starting point. Eventually there will come a Cpu module (according to diffrent shops , we have yet to see a official statement) which is rumored to be around 1.4ghz or higher (i only read this in a thread here on AW so dont kill me if im wrong ).

After years of being beat down from disappointment (read: The Amiga legacy post Deathbed Vigil ) I've come to expect nothing, but that the upgrade possibilty exists is good enough for me.

Quote:

Also the new hw , the new AmigaOne's thats comming....well we have yet to see the µa1 I model so i dont think (my humble opinion) we should expect the XC anytime soon (the XC is supposedly to be an souped up A1 with faster mem and busses) . All in all i'd say get an µa1 C now or a used A1XE and jump on the development wagon right away and that way you will know what to expect from the next hw to come and from there decide if you should upgrade right away or not. oh and btw to AW , enjoy your stay.

I just want to make sure that I'll have the hardware resources and driver support needed for 3D work. If the minimum spec can provide that then that's all I need. But where would there be used A1 stuff?

At any rate thanks for the welcome too, that's one part of the Amiga that will never die.. community.

@PolygonSoup

Quote:

Just to verify, will MiniGL be available with a release of 4.0 or is it part of the SDK now?

It will be available with the release of Warp3D, i.e. either with the 4.0 release, or earlier...

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@EntilZha
Quote:

It will be available with the release of Warp3D, i.e. either with the 4.0 release, or earlier...

Nice to hear.

Will my Radeon 7500 benefit from any of the new features of Warp3D or later NOVA?
(Sorry I did never checked what GFX cards can do or not, for me it's enough to have 24/32 bit colors and very high resolutions)

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@Rogue

Thanks for that indepth answer. Most shaders that I have encountered and worked with tend to be about 40-50 lines of code and have no recursive code in them because the GPU really is not designed to deal with recursion and execute quickly directly from the GPU.. There are a ton of ASM shaders and Cg shaders, and my reason for asking about compatibility, is that if you for instance support ATI's shaders (based on HLSL) there is a huge library of them out there with really cinema quality effects, and you wouldn't be re-inventing the wheel. Plus the portability for programmers would be excellent and you'd get a lot of people saying beyond the game engine, yeah this port of this latest game to Amiga would be easy to do..

I would go more for compatibility with shaders out there than I'd worry so much about how well it works with OpenGL, as I think there are many game developers who are still unsure just where GL 2.0 fits into their development.. Most rely on either an older version or are programming for direct 3d.. It would be nice to see this go in a direction, where the most games from other companies could get ported the quickest.. It would do a lot to bolster the platform's position.

Again thanks for going so in-depth..

@PolygonSoup
Quote:

I guess at this point I just need people's opinions on which combination will be best for development purposes.

I'd say start with whatever you can buy right now and that would be a MicroA1-C. I'd also recommend buying a RAM upgrade to 512MB with it because the GCC compiler can be a memory hog and we don't have memory paging yet. Compiling is very fast with the GX/800 in there and like somebody else mentioned, CPU upgrades are coming for an extra boost. You are kinda stuck with the single PCI slot but you can always sell the MicroA1-C when something more appropriate comes along anyway.

Waiting around for the mystical XC or for XE production to start up again is definately not a good idea. All things Amiga tend to be on a 1/2 year granularity at the best of times given the limited resources available.

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@PolygonSoup

Quote:

Will the cards you've listed be usable with the standard BIOS installed on them?

Well, if they POST in u-boot, they will work.

Quote:

Is there a listing of core functionality that MiniGL supports?

I see my brother already answered that

@Crumb

Quote:

Frank Wille knows powerUp very well, he may be interested in integrating a powerUp emu

Good point, I completely forgot that.

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@PolygonSoup

Quote:

PolygonSoup wrote: I guess at this point I just need people's opinions on which combination will be best for development purposes. uA1-C + integrated Radeon 7000 ( drivers available now? ) uA1-C + PCI Radeon 9200 ( drivers available soon? ) A1-XE G4 + Radeon 9800 ( drivers available soon? ) Thoughts? Comments? Concerns? Any upcoming hardware that may be a better choice?

Drivers for the 9200/9800 are (at this point) 2D only. 9200 3D drivers will come, 9800 very very likely. No drivers are available to the public right now, but the 7000 drivers are as good as done (in the state of "filling up the corners" ) and should go public soonish.

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@mbilla

New features of Warp3D V5:

- Multitexture support (two Texture units on the Voodoo, three on the Radeon). Separate blending where available (Voodoo Napalm and all Radeons), traditional model for Voodoo 3 and other cards that don't support separate blend functions. Includes DOT3 bump mapping.
- New vertex arrays for secondary/Specular color and Fog coodinates
- New interleaved vertex arrays with optimized support in the drivers.

Under Nova you will get the full T&L pipeline of the Radeon 7500.

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@DonnieA2

Quote:

Most shaders that I have encountered and worked with tend to be about 40-50 lines of code and have no recursive code in them because the GPU really is not designed to deal with recursion and execute quickly directly from the GPU.

Yeah, the number of GPU's that can actually make recusion/jumps/loops is rather small. It also adds the interesting problem that the shader program could get into an endless loop

Quote:

There are a ton of ASM shaders and Cg shaders, and my reason for asking about compatibility, is that if you for instance support ATI's shaders (based on HLSL) there is a huge library of them out there with really cinema quality effects, and you wouldn't be re-inventing the wheel

The issue with HLSL is that it is Microsoft IP. I wouldn't want to get involved with them. Cg is different since it is a cross-platform opensource solution. An external program could be conceived that converts HLSL into our shader language.

Quote:

Plus the portability for programmers would be excellent and you'd get a lot of people saying beyond the game engine, yeah this port of this latest game to Amiga would be easy to do..

Good point, however the issue is really a legal one. I dunno if Microsoft would care or even notice, but I'd rather not try that

Quote:

I think there are many game developers who are still unsure just where GL 2.0 fits into their development.

My biggest Problem with OpenGL 2.0 is that is was too small a step. Programmable shaders is all nice but that was already in 1.5 with the ARB extensions. The proposals by 3DLabs had some potential, and I am very sorry they didn't use e.g. the GLsync datatype and the asynchronous GL operation. As it is now, GL 2.0 is not too much different from 1.5.

Quote:

Again thanks for going so in-depth..

You're welcome. As you might notice, I like that topic

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@Rogue

From Haage & Partner web site I have found WarpUP version 5.1 that seems has the total support for both WarpOS and PowerUP

http://www.haage-partner.net/download/Amiga/WarpUP/

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@Rogue

Quote:

the 7000 drivers are as good as done (in the state of "filling up the corners" ) and should go public soonish.

With an update to Freespace, I hope

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@samo79

This doesn't help OS 4, does it ?

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@_Steve_

Quote:

MicroA1s only have a PCI slot

And at 33 mhz also... anyone know if this can affect the graphic/overall performance with a PCI graphic card ?

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@Zorro

Quote:

Zorro wrote: @_Steve_ Quote: MicroA1s only have a PCI slot And at 33 mhz also... anyone know if this can affect the graphic/overall performance with a PCI graphic card ?

Theoreticly, yes, if you need to fill the ram on the card at a high speed the PCI bus will be a bottleneck.

In practise i don't know, most cards come with alot of memory, so it'll most likely only effect very texture intensive engines, AGP was designed with this in mind, and can gain access to the main memory, while over pci you might hit the bottleneck

Or that's how i understood these issue's ages ago ;)

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@Amon_Re

Well, indeed it seems that the graphic (for the games, mainly... ) of µA1 isn't, now and in the future, its best feature...

(Anyway the 7000 should make its work for a good amount of time...)

Last edited by Zorro on 28-Jan-2005 at 03:59 PM.
Last edited by Zorro on 28-Jan-2005 at 03:31 PM.
Last edited by Zorro on 28-Jan-2005 at 03:28 PM.

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@Zorro

Quote:

And at 33 mhz also... anyone know if this can affect the graphic/overall performance with a PCI graphic card ?

Yes, it can significantly impact on performance. The hit from a slow bus when running in 3D mode has been well documented on other platforms, but it can affect 2D operations too, especially playback of animations and video.

A 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus has a theoretical transfer rate of 132MB/sec but it's rare to get more than about 90MB/sec in practice, and getting to that level usually requires that only one device is accessing the bus. If you're playing video a combination of normal overheads and demand for bandwidth from the sound chip and IDE controller probably means there's less than 75MB/sec available to the gfx card. That can be a real limitation if you need high resolutions, like say 1280x1024 (the native res for 17" LCDs), where it is enough for just 15fps.

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