Is it possible to write hardware renderer for Wazp3D?

[cloverskull]

Hey friends, I'd like to ask the community about whether or not it would be possible for Wazp3D to have hardware rendering. My main motivation here is that I want to use my Radeon 9200 and Warp3D but due to the unknowable state of NDAs and various component ownerships I'm not convinced we'd ever see such a driver in OS3

So...is it possible for Wazp3D to have hardware rendering? Is there someone capable of writing something like this that I can commit bounty money to?

[hUMUNGUs]

I am also interested and willing to put money into such a project.

[AlphaAmiga]

It is a shame we never got 3D drivers for 68K Amiga OS outside of Voodoo 3 (heck the 3D drivers don't AFAIK even take advantage of Voodoo 4 or 5 chips).

I pray every time I switch my A1200 on that my Voodoo 3 doesn't die!

[Korban]

Generic, one size fits all hardware rendering, no, not possible.
It needs drivers. Wazp3d/Warp3d is simply the GL stack.

[qz3fwd]

One of the problems with 3D on the Amiga is that they have relatively weak Motorola CPU’s and 3D accelerators of the time and what was eventually supported on Mediators does not support hardware T&L and therefore bottlenecked by the CPU. But having more cards with drivers would be nice. One thing I really like about Amiga OS 4.1 is the support for paid drivers for Radeon RX GPU’s with Warp3D Nova and video decode. Yes the PPC processors are comparatively anemic, but having hardware support is nice. I personally am fine with paying for drivers/enhancer packages.

[Promilus]

How hardware t&l which is DX7 feature works on everything made prior to that? It does not. Just as pixel and vertex shaders don't work on titles where there are shaders, yes, but done by CPU. E.g. Quake. For DX7 level titles even if you did write a driver for Radeon 9700 pro most likely you'd still lack in CPU performance. Because regular CPU of DX7 era were already Pentium III/Athlon K7. Fetching game assets through UDMA/100 or 133 interface from hard drive. And moving them around in SDR (100-133MHz) or DDR SDRAM (200+). I'd say odds of getting something playable which supports hw t&l on 060 are not good. On the other hand texture filtering and mapping already takes off a load off 060 so getting that basic functionality from Radeon series is already great. Video decoding is slightly different because while Radeons usually had nice engine which supports decoding it's only part of the process. So it still require some CPU processing again taxing 060 a lot.

[thellier]

Hello

I am the Wazp3D author
if Radeon 9200 have free source drivers for Linux then it will be perhaps possible to recompile/port them to AmigaOS.
Once we will have this driver a Wazp3D wrapper from Warp3D functions to Linux Driver functions could be designed

An other way would be to decompile/resource an existing OS4 Warp3D that support this card and then recompile/port it to OS3
But that will cause legal problems in some countries


This will be difficult and I wont do it myself as I almost no more coding now

Alain Thellier

Note: no Warp3D is not a GL stack but a low level 3d triangles renderer.
So MiniGL or StormMesa are the GL stacks and Warp3D contain the driver

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by thellier

Hello

I am the Wazp3D author
if Radeon 9200 have free source drivers for Linux then it will be perhaps possible to recompile/port them to AmigaOS.
Once we will have this driver a Wazp3D wrapper from Warp3D functions to Linux Driver functions could be designed

An other way would be to decompile/resource an existing OS4 Warp3D that support this card and then recompile/port it to OS3
But that will cause legal problems in some countries


This will be difficult and I wont do it myself as I almost no more coding now

Alain Thellier

Note: no Warp3D is not a GL stack but a low level 3d triangles renderer.
So MiniGL or StormMesa are the GL stacks and Warp3D contain the driver

The Linux drivers will require a lot of kernel infrastructure, DRM, KMS etc, A simple wrapper is probably quite a understatement

[alexh]

Originally Posted by thellier

if Radeon 9200 have free source drivers for Linux then it will be perhaps possible to recompile/port them to AmigaOS.

If an opensource 9200 (200 series, RV280, Argus) 3D accelerated driver exists anywhere it is here :

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...xf86-video-ati

Originally Posted by thellier

Once we will have this driver a Wazp3D wrapper from Warp3D functions to Linux Driver functions could be designed

I'd be happy to patreon support anyone taking on this task. I'd imagine you could get a following of 100-200 people $1-3 per month for 2-3 months.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by qz3fwd

One of the problems with 3D on the Amiga is that they have relatively weak Motorola CPU’s and 3D accelerators of the time and what was eventually supported on Mediators does not support hardware T&L and therefore bottlenecked by the CPU.

I've done a crapton of benchmarking of my SW rasterizers, starting from 6502 through Jaguar and all the way to Vampire V4 and a 3D Transform stage is far from Top place in the whole 3D pipeline.

Especially the closer you get to the 060 performance level, the lower that % of frame time is (assuming you're not just transforming absurd number of vertices for the platform) for this stage of pipeline.

The Number 1 performance killer is the scanline rasterization, where you break down each triangle into horizontal spans and handholding CPU of computing/clipping the endpoints.

Even on Atari Jaguar, when that code ran on RISC GPU (fully within the 4 KB cache), and even without actual rasterization of the scanline - just computing the endpoints, the 26.6 MHz RISC GPU could only process around 2,000 scanlines per frame.

It did, however, 3D transform a ridiculous amount of triangles in the same amount of CPU time.

I don't have my benchmarks here, but IIRC Vampire could process much higher number of scanlines per frame.


Of course, once we introduce texturing, then the 3D transform stage becomes, basically, irrelevant from performance standpoint...

[eXeler0]

Not that it is necessarily convenient from a wazp3d perspective, but there are already some hardware solutions out there based on ARM that are meant to be used as coprocessors (The ZZ9000, the Warp-cards etc). From that perspective it would be nice if there was a driver that could do something useful like 3d calculations etc on those ARM CPUs.

[cloverskull]

Originally Posted by alexh

If an opensource 9200 (200 series, RV280, Argus) 3D accelerated driver exists anywhere it is here :

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...xf86-video-ati



I'd be happy to patreon support anyone taking on this task. I'd imagine you could get a following of 100-200 people $1-3 per month for 2-3 months.

Same here. I think my issue is that I don't know exactly how to phrase what it is I'm asking for. At the end of the day, what I think would benefit a decent amount of classic Amiga users is the Radeon PCI card that folks tend to use with Mediators (which are also cheap and have a ton of memory, relatively speaking).

Whether that's through some kind of hardware accelerated Wazp3D or something else, I'm ready to donate a chunk of change for a bounty and also contribute to further development in something like Patreon.

But what exactly to ask for? And whom to ask?

[frozen]

Originally Posted by cloverskull

Same here. I think my issue is that I don't know exactly how to phrase what it is I'm asking for. At the end of the day, what I think would benefit a decent amount of classic Amiga users is the Radeon PCI card that folks tend to use with Mediators (which are also cheap and have a ton of memory, relatively speaking).

Whether that's through some kind of hardware accelerated Wazp3D or something else, I'm ready to donate a chunk of change for a bounty and also contribute to further development in something like Patreon.

But what exactly to ask for? And whom to ask?

Same here, someone maybe can raise a patreon or create a kickstarter for porting maybe latest Mesa on AOS3 supporting latest GPU (Videocore IV and VI, ATI Radeon etc....) avaible on Amiga....

[alexh]

I imagine that Videocore IV/VI (Pistorm GPU) are the most prolific Amiga gfx cards these days?

[thellier]

AROS for x86 have a Mesa port (=OpenGL) with hardware drivers for various 3d cards so porting it to amigaOs3 68k would certainly be the simpler way to add a more modern OpenGL to classic Amigas
Aros x86 already have a Wazp3D port with hardware rendering via this Mesa

Dont know if Aros x86 support Radeon 9200 though

[thellier]

Originally Posted by Locutus

The Linux drivers will require a lot of kernel infrastructure, DRM, KMS etc, A simple wrapper is probably quite a understatement

I dont know how much exactly but said it will be difficult to port the driver from linux to amiga

The wrapper was about calling this driver from Wazp3D ONCE it will be ported to Amiga = that wil be (somehow) the "simpler" (less difficult) part

[thellier]

Originally Posted by alexh

If an opensource 9200 (200 series, RV280, Argus) 3D accelerated driver exists anywhere it is here :

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...xf86-video-ati

Is it a 3D driver ? or a simple 2D driver ?

[thellier]

Originally Posted by alexh

I imagine that Videocore IV/VI (Pistorm GPU) are the most prolific Amiga gfx cards these days?

I was already asked about porting Wazp3D to PiStorm
But i dont have any clue about:
how to call native OS/GPU from within the emulation ?
what provide the Raspberry PI as 3D driver ? is it basic OpenGL driver or something else ?

[thellier]

BTW I have ported Wazp3D to Maggie3D/Vampire but the performance are not good and it is still very bugged so it wasnt released yet

so they are only very simple 3D programs that run fine with this Wazp3D like glsokoban

[alexh]

Originally Posted by thellier

Is it a 3D driver ? or a simple 2D driver ?

It says it's a 3D driver.