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HenryCase 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 7:23:09
#1641 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 12-Nov-2007
Posts: 728
From: Unknown

@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

Quote:
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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 8:31:23
#1642 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 9-Dec-2008
Posts: 994
From: Norway, Oslo

@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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 8:55:10
#1643 ]
Super Member
Joined: 12-Jun-2012
Posts: 1628
From: Norway

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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 9:01:16
#1644 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 28-Jul-2012
Posts: 2746
From: Amiga land

@HenryCase

there are some endianess here and there but on linux ppc it build and run

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nikosidis 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 9:11:04
#1645 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 9-Dec-2008
Posts: 994
From: Norway, Oslo

@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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 9:15:02
#1646 ]
Super Member
Joined: 12-Jun-2012
Posts: 1628
From: Norway

@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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 10:06:44
#1647 ]
Super Member
Joined: 16-Apr-2009
Posts: 1776
From: UK

@Overflow

Could we not add something like this to the Vampire.

https://www.logicbricks.com/Documentation/Flyers/logi3D_Graphics_Accelerator_01.pdf

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Overflow 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 10:14:21
#1648 ]
Super Member
Joined: 12-Jun-2012
Posts: 1628
From: Norway

@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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 10:58:48
#1649 ]
Super Member
Joined: 12-Jun-2012
Posts: 1628
From: Norway

The Guru Meditation uploaded a overview of the V4, presented by Manuel Jesus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zaDLI19RTU

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g01df1sh 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 11:15:44
#1650 ]
Super Member
Joined: 16-Apr-2009
Posts: 1776
From: UK

@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.

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Elbox empty Power Tower
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HenryCase 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 15:37:40
#1651 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 12-Nov-2007
Posts: 728
From: Unknown

@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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 16:23:43
#1652 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 28-Jul-2012
Posts: 2746
From: Amiga land

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

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OldAmigan 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 16:49:01
#1653 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 25-Dec-2003
Posts: 681
From: Dumfries, Scotland

@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

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megol 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 16:51:16
#1654 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 17-Mar-2008
Posts: 355
From: Unknown

@g01df1sh
Quote:

g01df1sh wrote:
Could we not add something like this to the Vampire.

https://www.logicbricks.com/Documentation/Flyers/logi3D_Graphics_Accelerator_01.pdf


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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 21:13:02
#1655 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2007
Posts: 1966
From: Kansas

Quote:

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.


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?

Quote:

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.


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.

Quote:

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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 3-Oct-2018 21:50:10
#1656 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2007
Posts: 1966
From: Kansas

Quote:

megol wrote:
@g01df1sh
Quote:

g01df1sh wrote:
Could we not add something like this to the Vampire.

https://www.logicbricks.com/Documentation/Flyers/logi3D_Graphics_Accelerator_01.pdf


If you mean something like a GPU using the FPGA sure, it just requires a larger FPGA to fit it all.


Yes, the FPGA size (size/price ratio actually) is the big limitation although FPGAs are getting cheaper.

Quote:

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.


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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 4-Oct-2018 14:45:09
#1657 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 2-Nov-2004
Posts: 4169
From: Rhode Island

@matthey

Quote:

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

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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 18-Oct-2018 12:06:02
#1658 ]
Super Member
Joined: 12-Jun-2012
Posts: 1628
From: Norway

GOLD2.11 is now out !

[GOLD2.11] (18.10.2018)
* Added Out of Order Execution for FPU
* Improved FPU to 52bit precision (fixes Elude demos)
* Forward bug fixed (thanks to neoman)

http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=6¬e=17984&z=9PiZVA

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wawa 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 18-Oct-2018 12:58:57
#1659 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 21-Jan-2008
Posts: 6259
From: Unknown

@OldAmigan &tlosm

Quote:
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 
Re: News about Vampire and Apollo
Posted on 18-Oct-2018 13:44:39
#1660 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@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.

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