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HenryCase
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 7:23:09
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Joined: 12-Nov-2007 Posts: 728
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| @Overflow Looks like a good start, good to see Quake 2 running on the Vampire. Will be interesting to see how much further the performance can be pushed.
I wonder also how Half-Life would run on the Vampire. Whilst the original engine (GoldSrc) is not fully open source (though parts of it are, https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife ), there is an altenative open-source Half-Life game engine (Xash3D, https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d ) which may or may not be straightforward to port. As far as I can tell Xash3D supports software rendering.
Before this is written off as impossible, it's worth noting that the original Half-Life engine was mostly based on the Quake 1 engine, which runs fine on the Vampire:
https://wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/GoldSrc
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What is Half-Life built on, Quake 1 or Quake 2? These questions pop up pretty frequently, and neither seems to have an accepted answer. In an effort to extinguish the argument, I've asked the people who know best. About Half-Life, that is. We're not touching the question about the chicken. Ken Birdwell explains it like this: "It is fundamentally just a heavily modified Quake 1 engine. There are about 50 lines of code from the Quake 2 engine, mostly bugs fixes to hard problems that Carmack found and fixed before we ran into them." At its core, it's a Quake 1 engine. You can tell this by comparing Half-life's map compiling tools with those shipped with Quake1. You'll find very minor differences -- none of them are fundamental. The core rendering is architecturally identical to Quake1, the only "significant" change is removing the fixed palette, making map lighting RGB instead of 8 bit, and converting software rendering to be 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, which was pretty easy and only required minor code changes. Our skeletal animation system is new, though it was heavily influenced by the existing model rendering code, as were a lot of our updated particle effects, though less so with our beam system. Decals are totally new, our audio system has some major additions to what already existed, and at ship time our networking was almost totally Quake1 / QuakeWorld networking but about a year later Yahn rewrote most of all of it to be very different in design. The most highly changed sections are the game logic; ours being written in C++ and Quake's being in written interpreted "Quake C". Our AI system is very very different from anything in Quake, and there's a lot of other significant architectural changes in the whole server and client implementations, though if you look hard enough you can find a few remnants of some nearly unmodified Quake1 era entities buried in places. Jay Stelly adds, "We also took PAS from QW and/or Q2 and a couple of other minor routines I can remember (no more than 100-200 lines of code there). There was some feature overlap (as Ken mentions) like game code DLLs and colored lighting, but we developed our own solutions to those independent of Q2." So there it is. This should put some arguments to rest. Half-Life is based on Quake 1, although it has a very small amount of Quake 2 code. Yahn notes that "we did use some of the winsock functions from Q2, that's about it. Probably more than 50 lines, but nothing too interesting." |
Last edited by HenryCase on 03-Oct-2018 at 07:28 AM. Last edited by HenryCase on 03-Oct-2018 at 07:27 AM.
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nikosidis
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 8:31:23
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Joined: 9-Dec-2008 Posts: 995
From: Norway, Oslo | | |
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| @HenryCase
It is understandable to meassure differences in fps just to have some facts about the differences between CPUs but are you realy serious about playing 3D games without dedicated GPU?
It looks shit and fps is far from good enough in any 3D game using any 68k CPU. Even the most powerfull PPC or x86 CPU is very limited without a GPU. Last edited by nikosidis on 03-Oct-2018 at 08:45 AM. Last edited by nikosidis on 03-Oct-2018 at 08:31 AM.
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Overflow
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 8:55:10
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Joined: 12-Jun-2012 Posts: 1628
From: Norway | | |
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| nikosidis&matthey have a fair point with regards to the whole GPU issue, and performance overall. But the Apollo Team has said that its not the core point of the Core. Obviously its intresting from "what can it currently do" without Core spesific optimization of the code being run.
And its also early beta, and given the V4 got more space, it will be intresting to see what potential they realise going forward. |
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tlosm
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 9:01:16
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Joined: 28-Jul-2012 Posts: 2755
From: Amiga land | | |
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| @HenryCase
there are some endianess here and there but on linux ppc it build and run _________________ I love Amiga and new hope by AmigaNG A 500 + ; CDTV; CD32; PowerMac G5 Quad 8GB,SSD,SSHD,7800gtx,Radeon R5 230 2GB; MacBook Pro Retina I7 2.3ghz; #nomorea-eoninmyhome |
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nikosidis
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 9:11:04
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Joined: 9-Dec-2008 Posts: 995
From: Norway, Oslo | | |
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| @Overflow
It is the same all over again. Some dream about a NG system, but it is not. You have to take the Vampire for what it is, and that I would say is a damed nice accellerator for your classic Amiga. Faster, cheaper than any other option. Classic Amiga was never for 3D games and so is the situation for Vampire.
If you absolutly want some Amiga branded hardware for 3D games, wait for the A1222. That is a NG system.
Last edited by nikosidis on 03-Oct-2018 at 09:12 AM.
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Overflow
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 9:15:02
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Joined: 12-Jun-2012 Posts: 1628
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| @nikosidis
Well, I have no illusions about it.
The fact that some might have, is the curse of all developers on the Amiga scene. |
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g01df1sh
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 10:06:44
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Joined: 16-Apr-2009 Posts: 1782
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Overflow
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 10:14:21
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Joined: 12-Jun-2012 Posts: 1628
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| @g01df1sh
Looks intresting, but Ill leave it to Matthey, cdimauro, megol or someone from the team itself to comment about the feasibility. Im just a non-coder that owns a Vampire, and enjoy following development. |
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Overflow
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 10:58:48
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Joined: 12-Jun-2012 Posts: 1628
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g01df1sh
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 11:15:44
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Joined: 16-Apr-2009 Posts: 1782
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| @Overflow
Im no programmer either but have good faith in the Vampire project and its future. With the right team and direction I believe it can evolve into something that's got good 2D and 3D performance. _________________ A1200 ACA1232 128MB Indivison MkIICr Elbox empty Power Tower RPi3 Emulating C64 ZX Atari PS BBC Wii with Amiga emulation Vampire v4 SA |
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HenryCase
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 15:37:40
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Joined: 12-Nov-2007 Posts: 728
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| @nikosidis Regarding 3D games on the Vampire, I'd suggest the reason to try them isn't necessarily about getting a quality experience, but in seeing how far you can push the hardware. Porting games like Quake 2 and Half-Life 1 allow for those limits to be tested. Also, they give a reason to improve the 3D acceleration. There's no reason why some FPGA logic to accelerate basic OpenGL calls couldn't be added, for example, there's space on the V4 FPGA.
To put it another way, nobody expects Vampire to be able to compete with modern computers, the fun is in pushing them as far as they can go. I think of it a little bit like being into classic cars. Someone who is into classic cars enjoys driving them and some of those people enjoy racing them, but nobody is expecting them to set lap records. |
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tlosm
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 16:23:43
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Joined: 28-Jul-2012 Posts: 2755
From: Amiga land | | |
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| guys ... what i dont understand is to difficult have a vampire on an a2000 with a cybervision 64 3d? or a vampire on a mediator 1200 with a vodoo or a virge gpu???? with this configs we will see 3d speed
_________________ I love Amiga and new hope by AmigaNG A 500 + ; CDTV; CD32; PowerMac G5 Quad 8GB,SSD,SSHD,7800gtx,Radeon R5 230 2GB; MacBook Pro Retina I7 2.3ghz; #nomorea-eoninmyhome |
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OldAmigan
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 16:49:01
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Joined: 25-Dec-2003 Posts: 683
From: Dumfries, Scotland | | |
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| @tlosm
I'm not sure if that will work under Gold 3.0.
Under the previous version, you could still use the original chipset for normal Amiga video and sound. Don't know if that is still possible or if it all goes through HDMI now.
Hopefully that will be answered soon.
Mind you, I'm speaking as someone who hasn't actually got a Vampire - yet
Fred _________________ Fred Booth ======================================== A500, A600, A1200 c/w Mediator and 030 AmigaOne and OS4.1 Mac LCII, G4 Powermac running OSX + Amigakit and MorphOS 3.0 Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys 2006 Macb |
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megol
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 16:51:16
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Joined: 17-Mar-2008 Posts: 355
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| @g01df1sh Quote:
If you mean something like a GPU using the FPGA sure, it just requires a larger FPGA to fit it all.
That design probably wouldn't be too great, requires Xilinx, requires SoC FPGA with ARM processor to do some of the work. Didn't see a good description of resource use but it can be estimated to use about 37k Xilinx LUTs plus an unknown amount of multiplier blocks. That's a lot of logic. And on top of that it looked slow like frozen molasses.
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matthey
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 21:13:02
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Joined: 14-Mar-2007 Posts: 2467
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HenryCase wrote: Would have been a promising idea back in 2013, but that ship has since sailed. NVIDIA now have GPUs with hardware accelerated ray tracing ( https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing ), and this will soon be cross-platform (once the Vulkan support for ray tracing is brought in). It's a shame, as FPGAs would've been well suited for the task, but they aren't likely to be able to compete now that modern GPUs are offering hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
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Before NVIDIA brought out the Quadro RTX boards, real time ray tracing would have been considered too difficult and now it is considered too late. Perhaps it is too late but these boards are very high end and expensive.
Quadro RTX 8000 with 48GB memory: $10,000 estimated street price Quadro RTX 6000 with 24GB memory: $6,300 ESP Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB memory: $2,300 ESP
The performance and visuals of these boards are amazing. They are probably making a premium profit margin targeting high end rendering farms and workstations. These boards are *not* the mass consumer market game changers (for gaming) even though affordable real time ray tracing technology will likely be possible with Moore's law ending. Is it better to invest in old rasterization technology or ray tracing technology at this point? Will there be more algorithm improvements in ray tracing? Would there be less risk in creating a more flexible CPU/GPGPU than higher performance specialized hardware for ray tracing? How much inefficiency is there for going through a PCIe bus?
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HenryCase wrote: Regarding 3D games on the Vampire, I'd suggest the reason to try them isn't necessarily about getting a quality experience, but in seeing how far you can push the hardware. Porting games like Quake 2 and Half-Life 1 allow for those limits to be tested. Also, they give a reason to improve the 3D acceleration. There's no reason why some FPGA logic to accelerate basic OpenGL calls couldn't be added, for example, there's space on the V4 FPGA.
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I agree. The old FPS games are good performance benchmarks. I liked Q1 but not so much Q2 even though I did a few optimizations for Amiga ports.
The easiest way to accelerate these types of games would be to add single precision floating point support to the SIMD unit but I don't even know if that is possible with Gunnar's ISA. After adding more complete FPU support and full standalone board features to V4, I don't know if there will be enough room for SPFP SIMD support or any other kind of 3D graphics acceleration.
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To put it another way, nobody expects Vampire to be able to compete with modern computers, the fun is in pushing them as far as they can go. I think of it a little bit like being into classic cars. Someone who is into classic cars enjoys driving them and some of those people enjoy racing them, but nobody is expecting them to set lap records. |
Old classic cars are likely to be beat in a straight line by newer more powerful cars but they can be surprising competitive in the turns with their nimbleness. I have a 1993 Mazda RX-7 base model (twin turbo) with bolt-ons putting out 300-350 HP at 2700 lbs. Modern cars with higher theoretical handling limits are usually more difficult to drive and require perfectly smooth roads. On paper, many modern cars surpass the RX-7 in HP and some even skid pad but the RX-7 can often keep up with much faster cars around a track and can put up good lap times on short tracks. Sometimes it is nice to not be fat. The same can be said of processors in some cases.
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matthey
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 3-Oct-2018 21:50:10
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Joined: 14-Mar-2007 Posts: 2467
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megol wrote: @g01df1sh Quote:
If you mean something like a GPU using the FPGA sure, it just requires a larger FPGA to fit it all.
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Yes, the FPGA size (size/price ratio actually) is the big limitation although FPGAs are getting cheaper.
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That design probably wouldn't be too great, requires Xilinx, requires SoC FPGA with ARM processor to do some of the work. Didn't see a good description of resource use but it can be estimated to use about 37k Xilinx LUTs plus an unknown amount of multiplier blocks. That's a lot of logic. And on top of that it looked slow like frozen molasses.
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Good analysis. It looks like a fixed function graphics pipeline for a rather narrow target hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_pipeline
They can be simple, small and energy efficient but usually are less parallel than having many shader pipelines. The FPGA can do highly specialized massively parallel units very easily if there is room. It may even be possible to write a simple GPU with OpenCL (using a C like programming language).
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/literature/hb/opencl-sdk/aocl_programming_guide.pdf
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Lou
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 4-Oct-2018 14:45:09
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Joined: 2-Nov-2004 Posts: 4229
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| @matthey
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Parallel? Never heard the term before...
As for that Quake demo, the screen-tearing was almost giving me a seizure...Last edited by Lou on 04-Oct-2018 at 02:45 PM.
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Overflow
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 18-Oct-2018 12:06:02
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Joined: 12-Jun-2012 Posts: 1628
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wawa
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 18-Oct-2018 12:58:57
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Joined: 21-Jan-2008 Posts: 6259
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| @OldAmigan &tlosm
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Under the previous version, you could still use the original chipset for normal Amiga video and sound. Don't know if that is still possible or if it all goes through HDMI now. |
rtg is not part of amiga chipset, except the zorro bus, and it is slow, especially in comparison with vampire throughtput to memory. it will probably only bring some limited 3d performance as long as texture are being stored locally in the 3d rtg card vmem, but considering the available hardware the vmem is tiny and 3d hardware features limited. it might just make a bit of sense with proper drivers on pci cards behind a mediator, such as voodoo or radeon, even though only voodoo has warp3d.Last edited by wawa on 18-Oct-2018 at 01:01 PM.
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BigD
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Re: News about Vampire and Apollo Posted on 18-Oct-2018 13:44:39
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Joined: 11-Aug-2005 Posts: 7475
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| @wawa
Duke Nukem 3D / Quake 2 and Alien Breed 3D 2 would all benefit from the Vampire. As for hardware accelerated 3D; just buy a Tabor and mess with that! Mediator, while good for some is a PCI kludge for Zorro. Just use a Zorro II/III card and enjoy Amiga with Amiga hardware. The Picasso IV is the limit of how far to push a classic 'Miggy IMHO. Mediator and CyberVision PPC / CyberStorm PPC all got a bit crazy with little to no software support IMHO. Last edited by BigD on 18-Oct-2018 at 01:46 PM. Last edited by BigD on 18-Oct-2018 at 01:45 PM. Last edited by BigD on 18-Oct-2018 at 01:44 PM.
_________________ "Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art." John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios |
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