Various news

Various news

17. Warp3D support of 3DFX hardware

»Warp3D support of 3DFX-Hardware
Shortly before the Computer 98 in Cologne, VillageTronic announced an add-on
board for their PicassoIV graphics board, consisting of a Voodoo 3D hardware
accelerator. To justify development, they need a certain amount of preorders.
3DFX's Voodoo chip set has set new standards in 3D accelerators in both
Performance and features. For a long period, it was the reference platform
for 3D hardware until surpassed by it's own successor.
For an application to use these features, an application programmer's
interface is required. This is the Warp3D project's main goal. It does this
by supplying a hardware independent API. To run applications supporting the
Warp3D API on a new hardware, a new driver must be written for that hardware.
We would like to emphasize that a Warp3D driver will be available as soon as
the Voodoo board is released. That way, the ridiculous situation of a 3D
hardware being available without driver support would be prevented. Every
Warp3D application will support the hardware, making a lot of programs
readily available. This includes OpenGL applications, which will
automatically work on every 3D hardware.
The development of a Warp3D Voodoo driver is very easy, because there's
already an existing hardware abstraction layer (Glide). The only thing to do
is to map Warp3D functions to Glide functions, a job that can be achieved
very easily. The Voodoo hardware has nearly all the features needed by
OpenGL, which would be very interesting to people wanting to use OpenGL in
future work.
This combination of top hardware and high power driver system would bring the
Amiga a big step forward in the games market, there could be games running at
speeds unimaginable on current Amigas, not even with he fastest processors
available. The slow bus system is still the bottleneck, and with the Voodoo
hardware, this can be bypassed.
All this could soon be reality, the only thing that could still prevent it
would be a lack of interest, resulting in too few preorders. We want to
encourage people thinking about getting such a board to preorder it *now*.
Time is of the essence! More orders are required and the time of decision is
drawing near.
We think this project to be very important for the future of games
development on the Amiga. If the project should fail, the chances for special
3d hardware optimized games will be very small, because the Permedia2 will be
available for really fast games, and the CyberVisionPPC can not be used with
turbo boards from other manufacturers. The ViRGE used on the CyberVision3D
can be used for low resolution games, but will not be able to handle e.g.
OpenGL-based games.
Due to the slow bus transfer speed, it will not be possible to have fast
games in high resolutions running at acceptable frame rates. For a resolution
of 640*480*15, considered low end on other systems, a frame rate of about 10
frames, probably less on complex scenery, is the expected maximum on an Amiga
without 3d hardware. Even a fast CPU is not that important, the bottleneck is
the graphics boards bus. A CPU that's twice as fast will not accelerate a
game by factor two, probably only by 1.5, or even less in high resolutions.
On an Amiga, 3d hardware will have more impact than on other systems.
Without 3d hardware, overall graphics quality is much lower, because software
rendering can't use all of the effects available to 3d hardware, including:
VillageTronics project can be called a real chance and will sure be a measure
for everything that's to be expected in the future. Now, a decision is if the
Amiga market is ready for keeping up with the current technology. If the
project should fail, games development on the Amiga will no longer be viable
in the long run, because 3d games are the current trend in the games
industry, and porting these to the Amiga will not be possible anymore. Fast
3d hardware is to software like the fastest PowerPCs to the 68020.
Currently, there are some game projects that will support Warp3D, and more
are announced. These games require 3d hardware. Many of these projects will
fail if the Voodoo project fails.
A list of projects supporting Warp3D will be available on the Warp3D webpages
as soon as possible.
To all of you who have not yet decided to preorder, do it now. You'll do the
Amiga a great favor, and you'll experience ultra-fast, high quality 3D
graphics.
Link to the VillageTronic web page:
www.villagtronic.com/amiga/survey.html«