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[News] Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4ANN.lu
Posted on 16-Jan-2002 16:48 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä61 comments
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Bill Toner talked about issues regarding the support of ATI Radeon chipsets in AmigaOS4 on the AmigaOne mailing list. Read the message below.

ATI Radeon support will happen, but I'm not sure when it will be completed. Permedia 3 support has been announced as well. This will initially support the original Radeon chipset, RV100 that has been around a while, and will at some point support the newer Radeon chip, the RV200 as well. My business partner and I are the "other party" Hyperion mentioned in their OS4/Radeon/Permedia3 announcement a while ago for the Radeon part. We hope to have something usable soon, but it certainly won't be done by their announced OS4 release date in Feb. But it will most definitely be done for OS4.x, and I have had an AmigaOne on preorder as well for some time... Prometheus will be the first bridge supported, as that'a all that I have right now. We do intend to support Mediator if we can, but Elbox's sense of PR has kept me disgruntled with them and I have not signed/returned their NDA form yet, so we can't yet support Mediator but I'll do it soon, plus Mediator 1200 models at least will be more work due to their small memory window access point. Especially since some boards apparently work with 8MB window setting and some other older boards only work well with the smaller 4MB window setting. Elbox PR said something about the trashed graphics in 8MB mode were some hardware dongle feature or something like that, but I find that hard to swallow... But we'll work it out at some point and find a Mediator owner to test it with. When I originally contacted DCE about supporting Grex a year ago or so now, I still have yet to receive any response at all from them. So I'm not sure they wanted Radeon drivers for their card which I thought was odd, but oh well. Perhaps I should try them again... AmigaOne will also be supported via the AGP slot. Regarding Pegasos, my NDA with ATI does not have "Morphos" written on it anywhere. But I got this NDA back before I knew of the Pegasos project at all and I run AmigaOS on my Amigas, not anything else, so Morphos at the time didn't have much meaning to my machines as none of them even have PPC cards. AmigaOS 3.9 and AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4.x will be what we target while we consider if the effort in renegotiating the NDA is worth the returns from MorphOS users.

But please, don't run out and buy a Radeon card just yet. We may dongle-ize our drivers to some tag we set in Radeon cards we sell, in an effort to reduce P96 piracy. Elbox screwed the P96 guys, as not all Mediator users will pay the P96 "shareware fee" Elbox talked about. We are going to include fully licensed P96 (and possibly warp3d if they don't have licenses already with all PCI bridge companies) with Radeons we sell to guarantee both P96 team, warp3d team,  and my company get return on our work. I don't intend to trash talk anyone, but piracy is a fact of life. We intend to circumvent that a bit, in the same way that PicassoIV did. PC store-bought Radeons may not work, just a warning.

As for the porting of Mediator/Grex drivers to OS4.x, I wonder how this will be done. Surely if OS4 runs on Elbox's SharkPPC they will port Mediator drivers to that OS4 implementation, but I'm not sure they'll let their drivers work on hardware other than Mediator+SharkPPC. DCE may not have Grex drivers work under OS4 on hardware other than Grex. Hopefully they will support more bridges/motherboards, especially Elbox since they charge extra for their driver CDROM for Mediator anyway. We'll have to wait and see, but I'm not getting any hopes up. We'll be supporting any PCI bridge we can with Radeon drivers.

--
Bill Toner
Forefront Technologies, Inc. (previously Progressive Data Systems)
bill@prodatasys.com

Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 1 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Phill on 16-Jan-2002 16:41 GMT
> Elbox screwed the P96 guys
Well yes, Elbox did win the fight. Who started it isn't so clear though ( and not worthy of discussion as it's all been said before ).
Phill
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 2 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Jan-2002 16:47 GMT
Well, CGX-PPC drivers (for DCE-PCI and Pegasos) would be the most interesting
ones imho. Maybe he can get in contact with frank@morphos.de ?
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 3 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Andreas Wolf on 16-Jan-2002 16:49 GMT
> Elbox screwed the P96 guys, as not all Mediator users will pay the P96 "shareware fee"...
So the Mediator users who use P96 and don't pay the P96 shareware fee screw the P96 guys, not Elbox.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 4 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Harald Frank on 16-Jan-2002 17:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (Andreas Wolf):
Hello Andreas Wolf,
you are talking nonsense !
At first it is ELBOX who has not paid one cent for using the
Picasso96 API or developer SDK in their drivers !
The Picasso96 developer package is not available for free or
to download just anywhere. Without that developer SDK it is
not possible to make full working drivers including the use
of all the internal Picasso96 features like PIP or overlay.
ELBOX has not paid for that SDK or development of any drivers,
so the only way to get the needed developer info was to use a
Dissasembler to get source code out of existing *copyrighted*
driver software ! Any use of such source code is illeal too !
So dont tell us the funny story about only the bad customers
has to pay. What they have done was and is illegal and the only
luck they currently have is that it is no such easy and cheap
to punch some polish company into an european court and tell
them the meaning of written law and justice.
So just see them as one of the very BAD examples in crime from
polish actors. That there exist other fine and legal ways is
shown by the company Matay who has a valid license for all the
customers of the Prometheus pci board.
But now you will hear very soon some cry from mr. Dullian, who
will tell us funny stories about p96 developers has stolen elbox
driver code or cloned their software LOL.
This are the facts !
Best regards
VMC Harald Frank
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 5 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Christophe Decanini on 16-Jan-2002 18:09 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Anonymous):
>Well, CGX-PPC drivers (for DCE-PCI and Pegasos) would be the most interesting
>ones imho. Maybe he can get in contact with frank@morphos.de ?
Do you really think that Frank Mariak (from MorphOS) will spend some time on CGFX drivers for AmigaOS4 ?
If AmigaOS 4 supports the blizzard/cyberstorm it will have to support the bvision/cybervision or GREX PCI bus. If the P96 team does not provide such drivers I don't know who will provide them.
If so the only option will be MorphOS.
The same story applies for the Pegasos.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 6 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by [JC] on 16-Jan-2002 19:13 GMT
Excuse me, but if you dongle-ise your drivers, what is the point of complying to the PCI standard ? Besides, someone will just break your dongle code off. This is the stupidest proposal I have ever heard.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 7 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by BobsonSirJonny on 16-Jan-2002 20:10 GMT
I've a Radion in my PC (just upgraded to an Athlon XP1700+ !!!!)- I was kinda hoping to strip my PC for parts, and use them in an Amiga One. Will this meen that my Radion is of no use?
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 8 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mike Veroukis on 16-Jan-2002 20:57 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (BobsonSirJonny):
>I've a Radion in my PC (just upgraded to an Athlon XP1700+ !!!!)- I was kinda
>hoping to strip my PC for parts, and use them in an Amiga One. Will this meen
>that my Radion is of no use?
Yeah, dongle-izing the driver to a specific card is not good. What if your card fries and you need to buy a new one? The drivers will end up being hacked and pirated in the end anyways.
One option is to sell the drivers only to companies which sell the PCI bridgeboards. Force them to pay for it otherwise don't release it for their system.
- Mike
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 9 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by tinman on 16-Jan-2002 21:05 GMT
All this talk of driver x for system y - are they really going to be written like that? With all Hyperions talk of HALs for the CPUs, you'd have through they/someone would create a pci.library for each PCI board, and then the driver developers only have 1 API to deal with.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 10 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Jan-2002 21:08 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (Christophe Decanini):
>Do you really think that Frank Mariak (from MorphOS) will spend some time on
>CGFX drivers for AmigaOS4 ?
>
Well, I think the drivers for the integrated OS4 P96-PPC solution will be good
enough but unfortunately MOS has "only" the CGX-PPC system so it would be very
nice if you could use the Radeon cards with this "other" gfxsystem, too.
Frank Mariak will surely be quick to aid with the realisation of such a project,
since he once said he would like to do radeon etc. drivers if only someone could
provide the neccessary documents.
>
>If AmigaOS 4 supports the blizzard/cyberstorm it will have to support the bvision/
>cybervision or GREX PCI bus. If the P96 team does not provide such drivers I don't
>know who will provide them. If so the only option will be MorphOS. The same story
>applies for the Pegasos.
>
Hmm, hard to say...maybe you can chose your prefered gfxsystem after all, or emulate
the other one? AmigaOS4 will come with an own unified pci.library which needs the
support of all current manufacturers of PCI solutions, though.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 11 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by redrumloa on 16-Jan-2002 21:23 GMT
Radeon drivers for Prometheus sounds very yummy:-) I guess they will follow the same route
as some Mac GFX cards, where you have to buy a Mac specific pci gfx card. Oh well,
an off the shelf PCI Radeon would be sweet and I hope it happens. However if this
is the only way they can make $$ off their investment then so be it.
I just hope the cost of their ATI Radeon is not 4 times as expensive as a off the
shelf PC card.
BTW will all the features of the all-in-wonder Radeon be supported?
Regards,
redrumloa
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 12 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Jan-2002 21:30 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (redrumloa):
>However if this is the only way they can make $$ off their investment then so be it.
>
Investment? ATI should pay _them_ for making drivers and open up the market for more
further hardware sales...
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 13 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by [JC] on 16-Jan-2002 21:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
You really think ATI give a shit about a handful of amiga users?
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 14 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Alcemyst on 16-Jan-2002 22:03 GMT
In reply to Comment 13 ([JC]):
LOL
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 15 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by redrumloa on 16-Jan-2002 22:07 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
In an ideal world, but this is reality. Mr Toner & co. will probably only sell
a couple hundred Radeon boards.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 16 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mike Veroukis on 16-Jan-2002 22:25 GMT
In reply to Comment 9 (tinman):
>All this talk of driver x for system y - are they really going to be written
>like that? With all Hyperions talk of HALs for the CPUs, you'd have through
>they/someone would create a pci.library for each PCI board, and then the
>driver developers only have 1 API to deal with.
Yes, but that would require the Amiga companies to speak with each other and we all know we can't have that without some kind of fight breaking out. Actually, that's something the OS is responsible for so hopefully once OS4.0 (and here it it is everyobe, >MorphOS too<, are you guys happy? There I said it ;-) is released this should no longer be a problem. Keep your fingers crossed.
- Mike
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 17 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by ike on 16-Jan-2002 22:32 GMT
Mwarf, if i buy an amigaone or pegasos, it is also for the facility to choice what hardware i want. I never liked dongle. For my previous experience, it is always problems after.
They must find a way to earn money "normaly", not by asking prepaid, dongle or ask for how many people want to buy their product, ...That's the amiga syndrom's. Just produce driver (and not only for radeon) and sell it.
But ... my point is that normaly these matter must be discuted between the os maker and driver programmers. Price of drivers will be included in the os package and that's all. No surcharge after coz you have only S3 driver, ne2000 support, ... (just supposition for instance).
I prefer to pay more for Os and have what i want that just wait a dongle product for each new driver. If you want new customers, try to work like the others market. Respect normal marketing attitude, i don't buy "by correspondance" my vegetables to the grocery. I don't buy graphic card's for windows, linux, beos, ... with dongles.
ike
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 18 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mika Hanhijärvi on 16-Jan-2002 22:34 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Harald Frank):
Not again. this whole P96 vs Elbox war is ridiculous. Those guys really can't talk to each other, they just shout to each other and then we must read it in every mailinglist and newspage :P I really hope there wil be CGX drivers for Mediator so that stupida and ridiculous war will end. You know, when two parties are fighting against each other the 3rd party might win they both.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 19 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mika Hanhijärvi on 16-Jan-2002 22:55 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Harald Frank):
Don't get ne wrong. I'm on your side (P96 team). I aggree that Elbox should have payed the lisence fee. What they did was wrong. but shouting to eachother wont solve anything, wont it ?
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 20 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mika Hanhijärvi on 16-Jan-2002 23:01 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 ([JC]):
Yep, I don't like that idea either.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 21 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Seehund on 16-Jan-2002 23:48 GMT
Please excuse my ignorance, but who is Bill Toner and what's his connection to the AmigaOne and/or AmigaOS 4?
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 22 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Frank on 17-Jan-2002 00:09 GMT
Read the message.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 23 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Bill Toner on 17-Jan-2002 03:45 GMT
In reply to Comment 21 (Seehund):
> Please excuse my ignorance, but who is Bill Toner and what's his connection to the AmigaOne and/or AmigaOS 4?
Just some guy that wanted a Radeon in his machine and got an NDA from ATI to do it.
A newcommer in the commercial Amiga marketplace, who has published a small number of
hardware hacks on aminet (A2000 tower, lithium coin replacement for NiCD, a couple other small things I don't
remember), plus how to upgrade a Cyberstorm MK2 040 card to run an 060 on my web site.
(http://www.rit.edu/~wwt5491/csmk2.html for those who might care)
Pretty much a nobody to the vast majority of you. We're new guys in Amiga commercial project land.
I have absolutely no connection with AmigaOne or AmigaOS 4.x development. The Radeon driver
is an independent thing done by my business partner and myself. Radeon RV100 (original Radeon chipset)
and RV200 (released a few months ago) drivers for AmigaOS3.9 and AmigaOS4.x when we get a copy
in the same way that Phase 5 made the original PowerUP PPC drivers that ran on AmigaOS,
but were not really a part of the AmigaOS, or closer like CGX team that writes drivers for graphics
cards that are not really part of AmigaOS. We get absolutely no funding for our time and work
from Amiga Inc., AmigaOS, Eyetech, AmigaOne, or any other established Amiga company.
And in answer to people commenting on crackers and pirates will just strip off dongle code,
we're certainly aware of that eventuality. It will certainly be done by someone with lots of time
and coding talent. If people would accept our strategy, charging
a price in line with PC stores for the hardware portion of our package plus the driver license
fees added onto that (which would most likely be cheaper in most areas than buying Radeon at
PC store and our driver disk seperate), most of our profit margin would be the same profit margin
the PC stores average, coming from a directly comparable markup over the distributor cost to us,
the same cost to PC stores around here. It seems in the mailing list discussion most Amiga users
would rather pay that relatively small amount to a PC store instead of to people trying to
support Amiga. They can certainly wait for the drivers to be cracked and buy from a PC store,
pirating the license fees if they wish. That would certainly happen at some point in time for
them as an option. I just think it's sad that the 6 months I spent negotiating with ATI, the
time and effort we put into the drivers, and the money we pay to Warp3d/P96 teams in license
fees for their driver development kits and API usage to the customer are not worth any more
than a PC store hardware purchase that we get zero return on and would rather the price for the
drivers go up by $15 or $20, the markup range of most PC stores in this area for these cards,
where almost all of our profit margin would come from in our card/driver package.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 24 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Bill Toner on 17-Jan-2002 04:46 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Anonymous):
> Well, CGX-PPC drivers (for DCE-PCI and Pegasos) would be the most interesting
> ones imho. Maybe he can get in contact with frank@morphos.de ?
When I started contacting ATI over a year ago, I tried asking the vgr.com
webmaster how I might get in contact with Frank about writing CGX drivers as well
as P96 drivers. I never got any response, and searching the website only found
Frank's phase5.de email which had since stopped working. This was before I'd
ever heard of Morphos, I finally gave up on a CGX contact, and got an NDA for
AmigaOS from ATI (Morphos might require additional negotiations, and I'd have
to learn the Morphos API to port/rewrite the drivers. It'll be a while...
I also tried contating DCE about supporting Grex but again never got any response.
While I get no funding regarding AmigaOS, both Hyperion and P96 team have expressed
interest in helping get the drivers working on OS4 if help is needed and they have time.
If DCE get me an NDA if they need so I can develop with their dev kit, I'll do it.
I'm willing to do CGX/Morphos drivers, but OS3.9 and 4.x are my current priorities,
CGX/morphos would just take longer.
If AmigaOS4 is able to support the PowerUP boards I'd imagine our Radeon drivers would work
with that. We're coding in C instead of assembly to make porting easier too, so PPC
driver should be relatively easy to do once we're finished with the OS3.9 stuff. Talk morphos/DCE
into discussing drivers with me and I'll put it on my list, but I've long ago given up
contacting them myself.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 25 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by priest on 17-Jan-2002 07:19 GMT
just wrote to say: Bill Toner, THANK YOU !
And good luck in your challenge.
r.
priest
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 26 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Sotiris Papageorgiou on 17-Jan-2002 08:06 GMT
Mr bill toner did ATI required a licence fee to give you the right to develop the drivers;
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 27 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by adam ceremuga on 17-Jan-2002 08:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 24 (Bill Toner):
so do the bplan/morphpeople need to get radeon drivers on the pegasos?
Yes, yes yes. then it will be slightly competitive. but the amiga one with 1x agp ? i don't think so.
the pegasos won't be limited by slower memory buses and agp of the amigao one in uitlising the full capabilites of the card..
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 28 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 09:15 GMT
Thought maybe this would be of interest.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1011051153
Doesn't matter though, as clones soon will be widely available.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 29 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Martin on 17-Jan-2002 09:29 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Harald Frank):
>ELBOX has not paid for that SDK or development of any drivers,
>so the only way to get the needed developer info was to use a
>Dissasembler to get source code out of existing *copyrighted*
>driver software ! Any use of such source code is illeal too !
Mr Harald, let me give you a brief overview of your
concerns from legal point of view.
Under terms fully in force in the European Union, reverse
engineering is not banned. From purely legal point of view,
reverse engineering is ALLOWED when done for the purpose
of creating software, which COOPERATES with the one
subjected to reverse engineering. This seems to be the case
of the Elbox Voodoo driver and the Picasso 96 system.
On the other hand, reverse engineering is strictly
ILLEGAL if done for the reason of obtaining information
to be used for creating software written to REPLACE
the (existing) program being dis-assembled.
As an example: if a person (or a company) dis-assembled
the Elbox Voodoo driver or their pci.library in order to
write their own software aimed at replacing Elbox drivers,
this is purely ILLEGAL activity, prosecuted with the full
power of the law
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 30 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Amifan on 17-Jan-2002 09:29 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (adam ceremuga):
Oh geesz the AGP1x thing again..Do you really think that the Pegasos can fully make use of the AGP2x bus?
You want to transfer the gfx data from main memory to the GFX card.
They have both the same theoretical maximum transfer speed. So you'
re mainly limitted to the sustained maximum speed of the main memory which is well below the theoretical 1064Mb/sec.
PC test showed that there's only a minimal advantage of AGP2x over AGP1x in games. I'm talking about 2 or 3 frames/sec (120fps vs. 123 fps, anyone able to notice the difference?) on the same GFX hardware (GeForce).
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 31 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Amifan on 17-Jan-2002 09:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (Christophe Decanini):
No the same story doens't apply to the Pegasos since Hyperion entered the Pegasos developemnt program. This should provide sufficent information to make AmigaOS4 running on that PPC board not to mention the GFX drivers.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 32 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 10:11 GMT
In reply to Comment 24 (Bill Toner):
Just keep up the good work, Bill. I will bring this up at the altnet #amigafun
moderated chat with bplan on monday, maybe they will be interested. Or you could
talk directly to Ralph "laire" Schmidt on arcnet #morphos if you like to. DCE & Co
seem to be rather hard to contact by email, unfortunately.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 33 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 10:18 GMT
In reply to Comment 30 (Amifan):
>Oh geesz the AGP1x thing again..Do you really think that the Pegasos can fully
>make use of the AGP2x bus?
>
Why not?
>
>You want to transfer the gfx data from main memory to the GFX card.
>They have both the same theoretical maximum transfer speed.
>
No, you are wrong - AGP2X has twice the speed of AGP1X.
>
>So you're mainly limitted to the sustained maximum speed of the main
>memory which is well below the theoretical 1064Mb/sec.
>
What can we expect - around 400MB/s?
>
>PC test showed that there's only a minimal advantage of AGP2x over AGP1x
>in games. I'm talking about 2 or 3 frames/sec (120fps vs. 123 fps, anyone
>able to notice the difference?) on the same GFX hardware (GeForce).
>
Depends on the application, but for most current games you are right.
But then some people said "Huh, no AGP4X? What a crappy system, and AGP8X is
coming soon...!!" ;-)
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 34 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 11:14 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Bill Toner):
Well I understand your point, and I would be ready to pay for those drivers. I would like to supprt you and Amiga. But you shoul understand that it does matter for poor student like me how much the board costs. If I'm going to buy the card directly from you international shipping cots etc etc will be added to price. And I don't have credit card. If I buy that card from local Amiga dealer then the price will probavly be not maybe doubled but much higher anyway.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 35 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mika Hanhijärvi on 17-Jan-2002 11:15 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Bill Toner):
Well I understand your point, and I would be ready to pay for those drivers. I would like to supprt you and Amiga. But you shoul understand that it does matter for poor student like me how much the board costs. If I'm going to buy the card directly from you international shipping cots etc etc will be added to price. And I don't have credit card. If I buy that card from local Amiga dealer then the price will probavly be not maybe doubled but much higher anyway.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 36 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 17-Jan-2002 11:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 24 (Bill Toner):
Frank@morphos.de, fm@bplan-gmbh.de
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 37 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 17-Jan-2002 11:39 GMT
In reply to Comment 30 (Amifan):
Actually.... the difference is minimal because AGP's goals actually failed...
Most cards in the market use it with half it's potential... Most chipsets
don't support all the transfer methods AGP supports. 1x vs 2x vs 4xalmost
equal with the current chipsets...
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 38 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Christophe Decanini on 17-Jan-2002 12:22 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (Christophe Decanini):
Sorry about the misunderstanding. I thought F Mariak help was requested to help the Radeon driver on the GREX on OS4.
If Bill is a third party he can make a deal with any interested company.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 39 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by José on 17-Jan-2002 14:21 GMT
On the AmigaOne features, there is 6xPCI, and 1xAGP, wich means 6 PCI slots and 1APG slot. Noone knows what the features will really be. The one thing that concerns me is os course the memory bandwith. But then again, so much time has passed that we don't know if it has been changed. Remember Bill said in the last AINc. exec. update that G5 announcement was one of the reasons for the delays. So who knows it might be just AGP1x and 100mhz bus and memory, or it might turn on to be AGP4x, and G5 compatible. Remember G5 has it's own memory controler on the CPU so it really doesn't matter that much if the motherboard mem is 100mzh only. Actually if you're to use a G5, buying a board with support for 133 mhz memory is POINTLESS, since G5 uses DDR and new bus.
G5 support is what I'd like to see most.
STOP creating false rumours (I don't mean it was intentional, but get the facts straight before pointing them as the truth).
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 40 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by priest on 17-Jan-2002 15:59 GMT
The next summary (straight out of my head) should prove that no matter which one of those future PPC Amiga options you choose, it will give the NATIVE AmigaOS fans a lot of JOY ! And for developers (bedroom coders) it will give immense amount of new possibilities. So, I hope people stop fighting and prepare to have fun instead.
People that know better are free to correct me, but anyway:
expanded ClassicAmiga:
- up to 66Mhz 68k CPU, no L2 or L3 cache
- up to 250Mhz PPC "accelerator CPU", no L2 or L3 cache (PRICEY)
- up to 528MB/s theorethical PPC-memory bus (up to 200MB/sec in practice?)
- 80MB/s 68k-memory bus (most things go through this)
- up to 18MB/s GFX bus (PRICEY)
- 4-18MB/s expansion bus
(somewhat pricey expansions, except on PCI daughtercard)
- 3MB/s IDE HDD bus as a standard
(up to 7MB/sec with pricey CPU intensive IDE or the 9MB/sec with pricey SCSI)
- modern expansion cards with slow access from PCI bus to system memory, etc...
Bridge: AmigaOne (real life performance totally unknown)
- up to 1xxxMhz MODERN CPU with multimedia instructions
- 8-16GB/s bus to L2
- 2-8GB/s bus to L3
- 528-800MB/s CPU-memory bus (no 68k anymore)
- 264MB/s GFX bus
- 133MB/s expansion bus
- 66MB/s IDE HDD bus (everything past 33MB/s is "insignificant")
- USB (a lot of new&cheap expansion possibilities)
- modern expansion cards, like firewire, ethernet, SB Audigy....
Next stand alone HW: like pegasos
(real life performance totally unknown (in public))
- up to 1xxxMhz MODERN CPU with multimedia instructions
- 8-16GB/s bus to L2
- 2-8GB/s bus to L3
- 1000MB/s CPU-memory bus
- 528MB/s GFX bus
(only a few % speed increase in 3D games, when compared to A1)
- 133MB/s expansion bus
- 100MB/s (?) IDE HDD bus (everything past 33MB is "insignificant")
- USB (a lot of new&cheap expansion possibilities)
- firewire
- ethernet
- modern expansion cards, like SB Audigy....
After that the following performance level would be the modern x86 HW level,
but (IMO) it would require a billion dollar motherboard firm to produce it.
(not going to happen for the current AmigaOS market)
And after that: AmigaNG HW is totally unknown, a traditional Amigans
"wet dream" (tm) performance, but no one knows, unrealistic to predict anything
perhaps it is a souped up STB. (do not expect anything/everything)
((While Amithlon on Athlon2000+ might beat AmigaOne/Pegasos in some specific tasks, I expect it to be slower here and there. (OS3.9 vs NATIVE OS4.5)))
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 41 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 17-Jan-2002 16:40 GMT
In reply to Comment 40 (priest):
Well, AmigaONE's problem is the 66mhz FSB. Fast G4 processors need an 133mhz
fsb but that can be solved by changing the multiplier settings. I do not now
how the 66mhz fsb will affect the practical performance due to the lower memory
bandwidth. We'll have to wait to see.
As for the x86 vs ppc part, the G4/1.2 ghz(out now...) already managed to beat the fastest X86 out there in RC5-64 benchmarks and several other stuff...
It scored...... 15500kkeys/sec............................
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 42 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mike Veroukis on 17-Jan-2002 16:47 GMT
In reply to Comment 30 (Amifan):
>PC test showed that there's only a minimal advantage of AGP2x over AGP1x in
>games. I'm talking about 2 or 3 frames/sec (120fps vs. 123 fps, anyone able to
>notice the difference?) on the same GFX hardware (GeForce).
That's fine, but the GeForce is an old card. Has anyone performed this test with a GeForce3 or a Radeon8500??? It's quite possible that newer cards take advantage of more advanced features. Just wondering.
- Mike
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 43 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by [JC] on 17-Jan-2002 17:14 GMT
In reply to Comment 30 (Amifan):
Try a decent PC. The difference is fairly noticable with my Geforce 2 MX on my VIA KT133 based board
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 44 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Christophe Decanini on 17-Jan-2002 17:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 40 (priest):
>(up to 7MB/sec with pricey CPU intensive IDE or the 9MB/sec with pricey SCSI)
Hey I have >30 MB/s in syspeed with a cheap ide drive linked to the UW through and IDE to SCSI adapter.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 45 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 18:06 GMT
In reply to Comment 39 (José):
>Remember G5 has it's own memory controler on the CPU
>
Do you know this as fact or it "a rumour repeated numerous times becomes common knowledge"?
Afaik we only know something about their G5 embedded "system-on-a-chip"
>
>Actually if you're to use a G5, buying a board with support for 133 mhz memory is POINTLESS,
>since G5 uses DDR and new bus
>
Whether G5 uses DDR or Rambus or SDR RAM will be the choice of the system designer. With its
faster FSB it at least makes it feasible to implement faster RAM types.
I heard beside its new bus protocol it still uses the 60x bus for compatibility, so it would
hardly be a problem to plug PPC G5 into a system designed for G2/G3.
This would still give applications that don't need high memory bandwidth quite a boost.
RC5 anyone? ;-)
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 46 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 18:31 GMT
In reply to Comment 40 (priest):
>- up to 528MB/s theorethical PPC-memory bus (up to 200MB/sec in practice?)
>
The RAM interface is not SDRAM, but normal FPM RAM, that means it does 5-2-2-2
and 4-2-2-2 bursts (?), so you should make it half your 528MB/s figure minus X.
I'm not sure how good Sysspeed measure the RAM performance, but it shows speeds
at bit above 100MB/s.
>
>or the 9MB/sec with pricey SCSI
>
The CSPPC/MK3 has 40MB/s UWSCSI.
>
>(everything past 33MB/s is "insignificant")
>
I don't think so. HDs are able to deliver well above 33MB/s sustained today.
And this doesn't take into account the fast bursts from the (often 2MB) HD
cache with full interface speeds.
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 47 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 18:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 41 (Alkis Tsapanidis):
Any secure sources for your claims (G4-1.2GHz, RC5 benchmark numbers)?
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 48 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 17-Jan-2002 20:08 GMT
In reply to Comment 47 (Anonymous):
www.mac.gr ...if you can read greek:)
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 49 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Mike Veroukis on 17-Jan-2002 20:55 GMT
In reply to Comment 48 (Alkis Tsapanidis):
>www.mac.gr ...if you can read greek:)
I just tried it. Man, my Greek sucks! It took me 5 minutes to read five lines! I find newspaper (especially technical) Greek almost impossible to decypher, but when visiting Greece I can understand the spoken language without problem. Weird.
As for the G5 stats, I'll take your word for it! I couldn't even find the page. :-)
- Mike
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 50 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Amifan on 17-Jan-2002 21:30 GMT
>>Oh geesz the AGP1x thing again..Do you really think that the Pegasos can fully
>>make use of the AGP2x bus?
>>
>Why not?
Please read below
>
>>You want to transfer the gfx data from main memory to the GFX card.
>>They have both the same theoretical maximum transfer speed.
>>
>No, you are wrong - AGP2X has twice the speed of AGP1X.
No you are wrong ;-) I was talking about system memory -> gfx memory. The AGP transfer speed can only go as fast as your main memory goes.
>>
>>So you're mainly limitted to the sustained maximum speed of the main
>>memory which is well below the theoretical 1064Mb/sec.
>>
>What can we expect - around 400MB/s?
Yeah that's a good estimate..Somewhere around 350-400MB/sec
>
>>PC test showed that there's only a minimal advantage of AGP2x over AGP1x
>>in games. I'm talking about 2 or 3 frames/sec (120fps vs. 123 fps, anyone
>>able to notice the difference?) on the same GFX hardware (GeForce).
>>
>Depends on the application, but for most current games you are right.
>But then some people said "Huh, no AGP4X? What a crappy system, and AGP8X is
>coming soon...!!" ;-)
Yes, that's how the PC world works, but then again we are amiga users and we don't complain do we? ;-)
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