Apollo Maggie 3D Chip - Preview Demo
 

This short video is a preview on the development of the new exciting Apollo Maggie 3D chip added to the already impressive ApolloSAGA chipset. With the Maggie chip Amiga finally enters the 3D era. This first alpha preview demonstrates the basic 3D modelling with true color texture mapping including light and shadow casting. This executable demo let's you walk interactively through a gloomy Dungeon....watch out for our new previews in the coming week, following the progress made by the Apollo 3D Team.

https://youtu.be/GIBK0O5QuMc

I'm surprised they didn't name it the Cyberstorm Picasso96 Warp3D chip.

See, it's statements like this that give people reasons to dislike things Apollo- or Vampire-related. It has hardware 3D acceleration? Excellent, well done guys, that's a nice little feature you've added. It finally brings 3D hardware acceleration to the Amiga? Nope, that's just silly. I've had 3D hardware acceleration on my Amiga for decades now.

Awesome work, guys, keep it up!

Also, is this backwards-compatible with Warp3D?

Otherwise it will yet another "great innovation" from the Apollo Team that nobody will use as they keep disregarding already-existing standards because of their insufferable case of "notinventedhere"-itis.

Would have loved it if they called it the "HYPERION". :D

I think they meant without 3rd party HW. A bit like if an Amiga from CBM had HW accelerated 3D. This should have been Hombre…

It is too early to draw conclusions, but the AMMX instructions for example have been used in many ports of games such as Diablo, Sonic Vamped and others by Arczi.

So it is easy to think that the new Blitter 3D can also be used for other ports such as Openlara.

Why they call it Maggie 3D Chip when it is all (along SAGA and AC68080) in the same chip?

Yes, that seems to be their belief alright. But then how is it any different to established solutions? It's still bolting foreign hardware onto the Amiga to give it 3D capability, and it's very much not the first to do that.

ApolloSAGA is the name for the complete Chipset developed by Apollo implemented in FPGA (Apollo V2/V4 series), containing all the Amiga custom chips, same as classic Amiga, but then evolved to give users new functions like AMMX CPU, 16-bit audio, 3D acceleration, etc.
I think it is important to understand is that the Apollo concept of building a future Amiga based on a complete redesigned 68K hardware foundation in FPGA is different than building Amiga's based on existing 68K or PPC hardware, using expansion cards, etc.
There will always be people who do not like this concept, the same as there will always be people that do not like emulation platforms.
But there are also a lot of people that like and respect the time and energy that Apollo Team is putting into actually developing new stuff, even if we "re-invent" stuff that maybe already is out here.
One of the reasons we take that approach is to be free of all kinds of discussions about legacy copyrights/standards that potentially suffocate the Amiga development instead of giving it oxygen.

So, for us the addition of Maggie 3D chip to ApolloSAGA means that we can offer Apollo V4 owners (Stand Alone | Firebird for A500/1000/2000 | IceDrake for A1200) a nice 3D experience, that's all.

And this is the statement you should make, rather than saying things like "Amiga finally enters the 3D era." Do you not see the difference, and why that difference is important to acknowledge?

If there's a Warp3D driver developed for it, then this will be a great new feature and selling point. If not, it's yet another incompatible extension that further fragments the software base.

I believe that this 3D Maggie is better than existing Amiga 3D hardware, because the control goes through $dff000 custom chip address space. You should not need any additional software layers to code games for an Amiga, as custom chips and cia chips can be accessed directly. SAGA does just that, by introducing new functionality into the $dff000 address space.

And that's my point. Requiring specially coded software immediately rules out any existing software that might run on it, and will mean new software developed for it won't work with existing Amiga 3D hardware.

Look at RTG for example. How much software uses RTG and can use the RTG modes of the Vampire cards? And how much uses the SAGA screenmodes directly?

Sometimes there's a good reason for these additional software layers.

I am by no means an expert on 3D coding, but from the little bit I did back in the late 90ies, I am sure that I would not want to do it by moving values into registers directly.

(Also, hats off to KK/Altair who created DREAD this way, but wow, it would be like going to the dentist every day for me :D )

We acknowledge the importance of compatibility and beside direct accessible coding we are working also on a Warp-3D driver. I will post news about this when we have something to share in this matter.

This is a much better news. How does this compare to a Voodoo 3 in terms of 3D performance?

I know nothing about this new Maggie project but common sense suggests its way too early to ask these kinds of questions unless… trolling [emoji51]
Then theres good old logic.. Voodoo 3 was a quite mature design by a big company. This is a thing that needs to fit into an FPGA with a bunch of stuff on it already..

Gosh, how touchy are you guys when it comes to the Vampire and/or the Apollo team?
I have been long enough on this forum that it should be pretty easy for anyone that is a regular here to know if am a troll or not.

I know about the hardships of implementing a GPU in FPGA, which made me wonder what kind of performance they have eked out from it and if they had any kind of preliminary numbers to show.

Because yes, this great news, but if the FPGA is not powerful enough / has enough free gates remaining to reach some kind of meaningful performance in stuff other than a tech demo, what's the endgame here? Wait for a bigger/faster FPGA?

That's what I am curious about.

That's a fair question and to be honest I have no idea at the moment.
The only thing I can offer right now is the 25 fps performance on the alpha v0.1 demo with 512x512 texture mapping on a 640x480 true-color display.
But there are daily optimisations now on Maggie, so I would expect the performance to get much better.
I will ask the 3D experts about some benchmarking figures.