We all know that actual GPUs for CellPhones are more powerful than any PCI and AGP graphic cards that are available on a vaste range of amiga motherboards such as AmigaOnes and Pegasos machines...

How much effort will require to create a little doubleface PCI 33MHz/AGP 1X electrical pins compatible cheap graphic card to fit into old Amigas but equipped with MALI or Adreno or Tegra. architecture, enough DDR3 VideoRAM on board, modern DVI, minidisplayport and HDMI connectors and driven by one of these GPUs?
Is it feasable, or does it require complete OpenGL porting (2 out of 3 I am sure that they work with that graphical framework) that actually we still missing in a complete form?

Last edited by Raffaele on 02-Sep-2015 at 10:00 AM.

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"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

I find it hard to imagine that a tiny gpu running in the mW power range could really outdo a full size gpu such as the R200 found on the Radeon 9xxx series.

If they do, I can understand your interest, but in that case the main obstacle would be actual drivers for the chips, the p96 one and the w3d one. Not to mention that someone would have to design a gfx card around one of those chips and in low volume could cost a lot more than a decent Radeon HD lowprofile pcie card on a pci-pcie bridge

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@Raffaele

Quote:

How much effort will require to create a little doubleface PCI 33MHz/AGP 1X electrical pins compatible cheap graphic card to fit into old Amigas ...

Buy a RaspberryPI and glue it into you Amiga, main problem might be the software needed to make the RaspberryPI into an Amiga GFX card.

Maybe you can get the Siamese software or use AROS instead.

The most difficult problem wouldn't be the hardware. It would be writing software for it.

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@Leo

Strangely enough but even the hardware part is not so easy, cellphones GPUs are just sip blocks, they are not even a physical chip but just some circuit implemented inside a multi purpose package containing also CPU, memory and memory controller.

@Murasame

Possibly an ARM with PCIe and GPU could be used as a PCIe device, with the GPU memory mapped to PCIe space.

But the premise that mobile GPUs are stronger than desktop GPUs is so far fetched it's beyond belief. Yes, Android has support for hardware accelerated video which we're lacking in AmigaOS. But why switching to another hardware would help with that software deficiency I do not know.

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@Raffaele

Not a bad question. I'm assuming you're talking about the old native PCI and AGP graphics cards from about 15 years ago.

Since all contemporary graphics cards ship on a PCIe board and only A-Eon's A1 X articles come with a PCIe slot, that leaves the other SAM based boards without more modern graphics.

The hardware is not without its challenges bit in the end it's all just plumbing existing components together.

Software is the killer. More than just drivers. There's not a large enough potential market for this type of board. Excellent 2D graphics can easily be gotten from an old Radeon 9200. Having access to "cost effective" and more current Unity supported 3D from an ARM SoC is not what's missing from the equation. So its' a solution in search of a problem

But I like that you're thinking in this direction.

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It seems that there are some ARMs with internal graphics which have PCI-Express an dcan function as an endpoint (ie. can be a peripheral in a PCIe slot)

But, once you've gone to the trouble of fitting such a PCIe chip into your Amiga, you've also already done the work to plug in an AMD or Nvidia class PCIe card, which are availabel as way better than Mali or TI's SGX530 etc.

The one place that this might, meybe make more sense than just a PCIe card is in a Classic Amiga system. Xilinx has some SoC FPGAs coming that include Mali graphics. Do something to fit that onto an Amiga bus if you don 't already have a Mediator or Prometheus or Grex to fit a (5V tolerant) PCIe slot adapter/bridge to. If someone is into such Classic hardware design and the chips aren't too expensive.

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@billt

An FPGA zorro card would be an awesome thing to tinker on, please make this for us

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@AlexC

As long Radeon 9xxx are Analog VGA only and couldn't support more than 256/512 Megabyte of Videoram I tought I made legit question...

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"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@agami

You assumed it well...

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@billt

I just wondered if cellphone GPUs are more cheap than adapting modern complete graphic cards aimed at desktop computers, togheter with minimal electric consuming of hardware chips that are mounted on cellphone devices...

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

I was using PCIe graphics in my A1G3-SE back in 2005. That should tell you something about how difficult it is to "adapt" modern graphis cards to our needs.

Now, my board had a bug where using PCI instead of AGP for graphics would lead to VERY bad lagging of the whole system, but before I could figure out the problem my CPU seems to have died (suspected first just firmware flash, as I was testing PCI-bridge enabling firmware for HJF at the time, but my JTAG thingie is not giving any readings from the CPU so I think it's dead.

Oh and my 9250 has DVI out, what do you mean VGA only?

Last edited by olegil on 03-Sep-2015 at 10:40 AM.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

I'll be working on that along with all my other projects...

Although one related idea I already had was an ARM/FPGA SoC on an accelerator card, and the newer ones including Graphics would slide into that. Likely readily obsolete and hard to get by the time I'd get to anything in 2037 anyway... But a Zorro card would be fun to make as well.

Last edited by billt on 03-Sep-2015 at 05:12 PM.

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@Raffaele

Arm socs are inexpensive (at least the low and mid rage) and have gpu, audio and some even wifi, bluetooth and lte modem build in. The question is: can these parts of the Arm soc be accesible by a external Cpu that is not the internal Arm core? can be attached and arm soc to the amiga bus? Imagine and Amiga accelerator with 68k/fpga/powerpc for the main cpu and arm soc to use the gpu and sound through picasso96, warp3d and ahi (and maybe also the other parts? wifi, bluetooth...etc)

the idea is good but not banal; but I suspect that software part is more complicated to do than hardware part

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@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @Raffaele I was using PCIe graphics in my A1G3-SE back in 2005. That should tell you something about how difficult it is to "adapt" modern graphis cards to our needs. Now, my board had a bug where using PCI instead of AGP for graphics would lead to VERY bad lagging of the whole system, but before I could figure out the problem my CPU seems to have died (suspected first just firmware flash, as I was testing PCI-bridge enabling firmware for HJF at the time, but my JTAG thingie is not giving any readings from the CPU so I think it's dead. Oh and my 9250 has DVI out, what do you mean VGA only?

Actually, I would be willing to bet that you were using PCI graphics, not PCIe.

@iggy

then you would be wrong. x300 on a pci to pcie bridge. hence the need for the uboot debugging.

how much did i win?

Last edited by olegil on 03-Sep-2015 at 09:43 PM.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@Raffaele

Any GPU attached to PCI or AGP will be limited by that bus. The card itself has enough performance, we just need to use it right.

Software -- software -- software

Just write a video decoding driver for any Radeon card we already have and we could all enjoy flawless DVD/HD video playback, just like a mobile phone. No need to put another alien chip in the machine. That won't automagically give us a video decoding or 3D driver by itself. It would also require software drivers, which we don't have, and noone with any spare time has any knowledge how to write.

Hardware is not the solution to our problems; software is. Problem is; writing software is extreeeeemely timeconsuming and therefore veeeerry expensive. It's also quite difficult...

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@Deniil715

Quote:

Deniil715 wrote: @Raffaele Any GPU attached to PCI or AGP will be limited by that bus.

Actually I intended an all-in-one graphic card which will use AGP bus only to receive commands and then act all by itself (just as Agnus and Denise) so then at max speed available for the chips, with its own RAM and a ethernet connecton .
As Fransexy noted, these SIP socs (?) Chips have all onboard, included WiFi. What could it receive from AGP BUS? Data of jpg, iff and png images stored on the hard disk? Data of browser programs? Nothing else. That it is trivial to handle.

Quote:

The card itself has enough performance, we just need to use it right. Software -- software -- software Just p

Actually what we need are drivers, drivers, drivers...

Once we will have card on solid iron and drivers to pilote it and integrate with desktop and actual Amiga programs such as TVPaint or mPlayer, then we could think at any further software that we need...

Last edited by Raffaele on 04-Sep-2015 at 11:26 AM.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

Quote:

by Leo on 2-Sep-2015 13:55:04 The most difficult problem wouldn't be the hardware. It would be writing software for it.

Writing complex, reliable software is indeed a significant challenge in technology development.