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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Gaming => Topic started by: Khephren on March 29, 2011, 10:14:54 PM

Title: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 29, 2011, 10:14:54 PM
Looking for a new job, I found 'lucky mountain games' and their title 'racing apex'. Something about it makes me think of the Amiga. Maybe something an accelerated A1200 could do. If we had not been so facinated by textured poly's, could we have had something like this?

better screenshots here:  http://toucharcade.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65000
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: B00tDisk on March 29, 2011, 10:44:15 PM
Wow, 1995 called and wants its Sega System 2 arcade games back...!

All kidding aside, for phone games those aren't bad looking.  Yeah, an upgraded 1200 probably could've thrown that many flat-shaded polygons around.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 29, 2011, 11:12:33 PM
yeah thats what I thought, pure sega. i'd love to work on something like that. Although it has gourard shading as well, dunno how intensive that is to generate in software. Certainly plenty od demos do it.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: commodorejohn on March 30, 2011, 12:43:23 AM
Quote from: Khephren;625844
Although it has gourard shading as well, dunno how intensive that is to generate in software. Certainly plenty od demos do it.
Gourad shading isn't intensive as far as shading models go, but any  model is going to suffer in comparison to flat-shading on the Amiga  simply because you can't use the blitter for fast fills like you can with flat shading. I suppose if you limited yourself to only a couple levels of shading you could divvy up each polygon span into sections of each color and use that, but it'd still be slower.

I'd expect that demos use precalculated shading or somesuch, but I dunno.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: runequester on March 30, 2011, 01:17:00 AM
well, if we're talking gaming future for the amiga, presumably we're also talking a post-AGA chipset :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: fishy_fiz on March 30, 2011, 04:27:01 AM
Ive said it a few times before, but Im still pretty intrigued about seeing some games made for at least moderately upgraded aga machines that suit its strengths . Yes, it (aga) may have been a little more moderate an upgrade over ocs/ecs than it could/should have been, but even ocs/ecs provided some impressive results sometimes, with a cpu 10 times+ slower, and running inside much less, and slower ram. I can see no reason why something akin to the sega 32x's versions of Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, etc. couldnt be achieved on an expanded 68k/aga syetm (not that there's are exactly the "strengths" I referred to earlier, more a reference to the game Khephren linked to) .
With the 68k side of the amiga being somewhat active in recent times (minimig/natami/aros68k) I've still not given up hope on seeing a game or two written to take advantage of a higher lowest denominator than in the Amigas heyday.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: runequester on March 30, 2011, 04:28:42 AM
Well, we have stuff like Genetic Species to show what could have been.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: fishy_fiz on March 30, 2011, 04:33:43 AM
Yeah, but things like fps arent really suited to AGA. Sure there have been some decent fps shooters, but AGA handles flat polygons much better than texture mapping, not to mention the potential for "impressive" 2d stuff (even 68000/ecs did stuff like elfmania for example).
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 30, 2011, 11:50:22 AM
That's exactly what i'm talking about. An evolution of what went before, rather than an attempt to ape the PC.

Zeewolf, no second prize, frontier or cybercon 3. All done with a lot more colours/polys. Maybe with some vertex shading (gourard shading). Old school, but I bet they would look really nice on an 030 with plenty of RAM.

Genetic species is lovely, but everyone switched to trying to do doom, when the old school way of doing it went out the window.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: tasmanian guy on March 30, 2011, 12:08:38 PM
I think there are a lot of iphone games / ipad games that rely on gameplay more so than graphics!
 
Angry birds being one of them and would love a port of that to the Amiga, no reason why an Amiga 500 couldn't run it!
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Amiga_Nut on March 30, 2011, 12:29:09 PM
I'm going to say no because that game would probably need 200mhz Pentium MMX CPU to do 30FPS. As that is into PPC territory the answer is no because nobody would spend £1000s to play games on an Amiga when a few hundred would get you a Playstation 1 with equal power for £300.

That game is massively CPU intensive, so unless Commodore had a secret 3D GPU project at half the cost of Orchid/Matrox/PowerVR OR suddenly the price of 50mhz 060 CPUs were half that of 60Mhz Pentium CPUs then never would have happened IMO.

Games like Super Stardust AGA do manage to do in 14mhz what a PC need 120mhz for BUT that is all custom chip assisted really. 3D always was CPU intensive in the 90s, Amiga was a slow CPU based machine with clever 2D custom chips....you see the problem ;)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Britelite on March 30, 2011, 12:34:39 PM
Quote from: tasmanian guy;625968

Angry birds being one of them and would love a port of that to the Amiga, no reason why an Amiga 500 couldn't run it!


I can think of a lot of reasons to why an Amiga 500 couldn't run Angry Birds ;)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: tasmanian guy on March 30, 2011, 12:50:22 PM
Quote from: Britelite;625973
I can think of a lot of reasons to why an Amiga 500 couldn't run Angry Birds ;)

Please start listing them!  Enlighten me!
 
320x256 screen res would suffice
32 colours
scrolling is not an issue
physics would not be an issue (eg look at Stunt Car Racer).
Music not an issue
Sprites not an issue
 
Hell you could *almost* write the game in Amos!
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 30, 2011, 12:54:46 PM
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;625971

That game is massively CPU intensive, so unless Commodore had a secret 3D GPU project at half the cost of Orchid/Matrox/PowerVR OR suddenly the price of 50mhz 060 CPUs were half that of 60Mhz Pentium CPUs then never would have happened IMO.

No I don't see the problem. I have a machine here that's 10mips vs A500's .75. A lot of us have them. I can't see  a good reason why my machine can't throw around a lot more untextured polys, with more colours using a c2p routine? Perhaps we won't reach this quality, certainly not this resolution.

Perhaps I misnamed the thread, perhaps i'm just thinking that we could have stuff not a million miles away from this. I was thinking that 'flying high' for example would have been better if they'd concentrated on what the amiga could do, rather than what it wasn't built for.

Although would we have accepted it? I love looking at 'old school' graphics now...but when we were younger, would we have wanted this over something that attempted textures?
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: bloodline on March 30, 2011, 01:17:04 PM
Quote from: tasmanian guy;625968
I think there are a lot of iphone games / ipad games that rely on gameplay more so than graphics!
 
Angry birds being one of them and would love a port of that to the Amiga, no reason why an Amiga 500 couldn't run it!
All the big selling iPhone games are so simple they could all have come directly from the 8bit era :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: AmigaNG on March 30, 2011, 01:36:56 PM
I think the closest thing we have to that game on the Amiga is Leading Lap, which I think is not that bad, using the same engine and making it more arcadee and more for aga and high spec amiga's I seen no reason why something like that could'nt be made.

leadinglap video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CilB8OBvsOY

also Hunter I think is a good example of how much could be done, very first GTA stly game I played where you could get into car, tank, bike, boat, etc all in 3d and gfx and animation where pritty soild for their time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3KNeckjgfs

I think Agry Birds could be done on Amiga, the gravity/physic part is only thing questioning but I'm sure I played a Worms rip off PD game that you could shoot tree over or somthing like that, it be nice if we could get a port or a clone made on the Amiga.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: gertsy on March 30, 2011, 01:54:34 PM
Yep great colours.  It looks like it could have been a hit A7000 game for 1998.
If only that alternate reality was real.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Amiga_Nut on March 30, 2011, 02:13:54 PM
Quote from: gertsy;625987
Yep great colours.  It looks like it could have been a hit A7000 game for 1998.
If only that alternate reality was real.


HP PA-RISC based A5000 rumourware machine running WinNT? :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 30, 2011, 02:17:38 PM
Quote from: gertsy;625987
Yep great colours.  It looks like it could have been a hit A7000 game for 1998.
If only that alternate reality was real.

I don't think it's far off what an fast 030 or perhaps an 040 could manage. At 320x256 of course. Maybe drop the vertex shading (which would be a shame).
  Nothing wrong with talking alternate realities, or even giving some game coders future food for thought.
  There's a lot of retro style stuff out there these days, that I think our old girls would be more than capable of giving it a good shot at.

I was hoping some demo coders would chime in and tell us a bit about polygon throughput and gourard shading on expanded amigas, and I wonder if an FPU would be of any help.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Amiga_Nut on March 30, 2011, 02:18:43 PM
Quote from: Khephren;625977
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;625971

That game is massively CPU intensive, so unless Commodore had a secret 3D GPU project at half the cost of Orchid/Matrox/PowerVR OR suddenly the price of 50mhz 060 CPUs were half that of 60Mhz Pentium CPUs then never would have happened IMO.

No I don't see the problem. I have a machine here that's 10mips vs A500's .75. A lot of us have them. I can't see  a good reason why my machine can't throw around a lot more untextured polys, with more colours using a c2p routine? Perhaps we won't reach this quality, certainly not this resolution.

Perhaps I misnamed the thread, perhaps i'm just thinking that we could have stuff not a million miles away from this. I was thinking that 'flying high' for example would have been better if they'd concentrated on what the amiga could do, rather than what it wasn't built for.

Although would we have accepted it? I love looking at 'old school' graphics now...but when we were younger, would we have wanted this over something that attempted textures?


Well by the time it was even viable on a mass market Amiga, say the 3rd generation A1200 with 50mhz 060 we would be on Dreamcast gaming with Sega Rally 2 visuals so it would have been nice but not a killer app to bring people back to the Amiga from the consoles they gamers had migrated to (PC was too expensive for a long time compared to something like £99 Dreamcast).

Remember that without a 3D GPU textured or untexture, polygons are crazy CPU time, and with scenery like that and cars like that and Gourad/Phong shading it is no way possible below 50mhz 040 because a 486DX22 66 may only just manage that sort of detail. Try playing Fatal Racing/Whiplash on a 25mhz 486 and you get the idea.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: yssing on March 30, 2011, 03:01:23 PM
AmigaNG >> I have never ever heard of hunter.. But I have to try it out.. looks great..

The amiga was good at handling 3D games.. not texture mapped though.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: bloodline on March 30, 2011, 03:24:14 PM
Quote from: yssing;626000
AmigaNG >> I have never ever heard of hunter.. But I have to try it out.. looks great..

The amiga was good at handling 3D games.. not texture mapped though.
That's true, even AMOS 3D was able to produce some really quite dramatic 3D gfx!
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 30, 2011, 03:26:17 PM
@Amiga_nut

Fatal racing is a bad example. It's fully textured. Texture maps are far harder computationally than either plain shaded polys of gouraud shading. Phong shading is nothing like gourard shading, it's far harder to do as well.

I'm not so much interested in what what came out when, or some hyperthetical A7000 etc. I'm talking about what the limits of our machines actually are. That's why i'm hoping to get some coder input, i'm sure there's some demo coders who know whats what.

yeti3D on a 16.8mhz arm on the GBA manages texture mapping and gouraud. And i'm not even talking about texturemapping.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 30, 2011, 03:38:13 PM
Quote from: AmigaNG;625986
I think the closest thing we have to that game on the Amiga is Leading Lap, which I think is not that bad, using the same engine and making it more arcadee and more for aga and high spec amiga's I seen no reason why something like that could'nt be made.

Yeah, up the colours to get rid of the dither patterns, increase the poly count by perhaps a factor of four. Maybe add a shading option for higher end machines, and perhaps options to up the rez. I don't see what would be so out of this world for a fast 030, with plenty of ram.

Leading lap runs ok on an base A1200. Most 030/50's are 8x faster than that, and many have FPU's.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Amiga_Nut on March 30, 2011, 04:34:22 PM
Quote from: Khephren;626004
@Amiga_nut

Fatal racing is a bad example. It's fully textured. Texture maps are far harder computationally than either plain shaded polys of gouraud shading. Phong shading is nothing like gourard shading, it's far harder to do as well.

I'm not so much interested in what what came out when, or some hyperthetical A7000 etc. I'm talking about what the limits of our machines actually are. That's why i'm hoping to get some coder input, i'm sure there's some demo coders who know whats what.

yeti3D on a 16.8mhz arm on the GBA manages texture mapping and gouraud. And i'm not even talking about texturemapping.

16mhz ARM 32bit RISC CPU and 1/4 the Amiga low resolution = 3D rally games on GBA. If anything remotely like that was possible we would have seen it on A1200 with Fast RAM configs then. GBA is not a good example.

Zeewolf is probably the fastest basic 3D routines we have on Amiga, so I guess if you run that on 030/50, 040/25 and 060/50 it's a good guide.

Gourad shading requires lots of colours, lots of colours = lots of bitplanes = slow down of chipset with many writes to chip ram per pixel coloured. I don't know if it would go beyond 32 colour flat shaded polygons really without GPU assist.

Another test is F1GP. No textures and low colour count. Again I used that on a 486SX 25 and it was quite fast. Never tried it on my 030/25 A4000 I had briefly in the mid 90s so maybe someone else can try that for us.

edit: 8mhz first generation ARM CPU as seen in the Archimedes A3xx and A4xx models in 1987 had the same CPU power as an 030/25 Motorola CPU. So probably 060/33mhz performance in the GBA version coupled with 75% less pixels to write to the screen.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Amiga_Nut on March 30, 2011, 04:38:14 PM
Quote from: Khephren;626011
Yeah, up the colours to get rid of the dither patterns, increase the poly count by perhaps a factor of four. Maybe add a shading option for higher end machines, and perhaps options to up the rez. I don't see what would be so out of this world for a fast 030, with plenty of ram.

Leading lap runs ok on an base A1200. Most 030/50's are 8x faster than that, and many have FPU's.


FPU is not used in these kind of games, they're not ray tracing.

And Leading Lap is about 1/100th the complexity of 3D world detail being rendered. Actually Leading Lap looks like AMOS 3D AGA product :)

I think Zeewolf is more advanced and efficient technically.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: fishy_fiz on March 30, 2011, 04:47:34 PM
FPU could absolutely make a big difference for a polygonal game. Additionally the amigas blitter can be used as well for fill patterns. Another pro for this type of game on the amiga is that it could operate largely inside fast ram and chip be reserved for the actual displaying of the polygons + sound. Again I use Segas 32x as a good point of reference. It was all software rendered and it's graphics fill rates are possibly even inferior to that of the Amiga.

Edit: those gba and archimedes specs are very far from accurate. A GBA resolution is 240x160 = 38400 pixels vs 320x200/320x256 (64000/81920), which is between 45 and 60 percent of the pixel count. A massive difference to the 25% quoted. As for the 8mhz cpu in early archimedes, its probably closer to 2x raw performance of the 68000 cpu in an a500, not to mention the fact that risc architectures often require more instructions for same end result as a cisc cpu.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 30, 2011, 04:53:27 PM
FPU may not be used, but they SHOULD be used if available. How do you expect to do perspective correction in fixed point? Why do you think so many PC games made use of DX not SX processors on the PC? Do you honestly think FPU's are only good for Ray Tracing?

FPU are used heavily in games on other platforms, the reason they were not on ours, is because they were not a standard feature of the low end, for whom games were generally produced. So most of us have a second processor, that could be used to off load some of the grunt work, doing bugger all most of the time. Again any coder input woud be cool.

Leading lap may look a bit..erm...shit :)  but it moves at quite a clip. Which I guess was the point.

Zeewolf was cool, short draw distance though. and very few colours. I'm sure with what we now know about c2p, and the systems most of us have, it could be improved on a lot.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Franko on March 30, 2011, 05:55:51 PM
Indianapolis 500 for the Amiga is a good example of how much better a game can be with an accelerator board & fpu on the Amiga... :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: yssing on March 30, 2011, 05:59:01 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqFOwqca4A <- was really cool.. Ran perfectly on a stock A500 AFAIR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T9h3P8xtgA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMXL6rCltzY&feature=related
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: fishy_fiz on March 31, 2011, 12:20:32 AM
Ah, No Second Prize, great game once you get used to controls  :) (theyre quite touchy).

Hypothetically, what heavy(er) polygonal games would people be interested in ? A racer seems the obvious one, but personally Id also like to see a Virtua Fighters style beat 'em up and an updated Elite style game.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 01:46:12 AM
something like elite/frontier for certain. and a nice pixel art rts would be cool- wasn't the bitmaps 'z' originaly meant to be for amiga before they switched platforms?

@amiga_nut
ARM's are lovely chips, but you are over playing their power by a great margin. I should know, i've been developing DS games for years. The archie was a lovely machine, but some times struggled with scrolling because it was cpu bound with no co-pro's.

the bitplane to chunky problem has been some what over come for some time now. novacoders scumm port is in 8bit, nargoth rpg is in ham8. many demos use 8bit or ham8. you mention 32 colours, i wouldn't even say no to that! most amiga sims are 16 and dithered.

zee wolf is nice, but does not really show how much you could throw around.

"if it was possible we would have seen it" not really. all the games companies began to desert the amiga,and those that remained gave us what we wanted- texture mapping and doom clones in the main  :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: tasmanian guy on March 31, 2011, 10:30:18 AM
More 3D games that were done well on the Amiga
 
Stunt Car Racer!  That was awesome with great physics!
 
But the questions is...who is going to port or do an Angry Birds clone for the classic Amiga...is there a competition in that?
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Hattig on March 31, 2011, 12:26:23 PM
Quote from: fishy_fiz;626020
As for the 8mhz cpu in early archimedes, its probably closer to 2x raw performance of the 68000 cpu in an a500, not to mention the fact that risc architectures often require more instructions for same end result as a cisc cpu.

The 10 MIPS 12.5MHz ARM60 in the 3D0 console was computationally around the same performance as a 25MHz+ 68030. Almost certainly the ARM2 in the Archimedes was at least 4x faster than the 68000 (4 MIPS vs 0.7 MIPS), if only because it was pipelined and had a 32-bit ALU. ARM of course has free predication and barrel shifting in its instruction set, so simple anti-RISC arguments aren't always applicable.

The GBA used an ARM7 chip at 16MHz. This has higher IPC (nearly 1DMIPS/MHz) as well as a higher clock speed. It's probably equivalent to a 50MHz+ 68030 - and only has to do 50% of the pixel rendering, so we'd need a 25MHz 68040 in an Amiga.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: bloodline on March 31, 2011, 12:38:31 PM
Why doesn't someone simply hook the MiniMig FPGA to an ARM chip, clock it down to 8mhz run AROS on it and see :-D
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 01:21:35 PM
@Hattig The ARM 2 was  very powerfull chip. Clocking in at 4 MIPS easy, VS the 68k 1MIP. But these are RISC MIPS, ARM2 had a much simpler instruction set (roughly one third the 68k), where you need to combine some instructions to equal one 68k CISC one. So some your throughput on MIPS are combined instructions. Rough comparison might x2 as powerfull. I would not say any more than that.

3D0= 25mhz 030, sounds about right. If we work on the basis of X2 as powerfull per clock as a 68k.
Bare in mind the 3D0 had a DSP, FPU and two video co-processors (unsurprising, as it's from ex Amiga designers).

3D0 ARM 60 (FPU)=.83 DMIPS/MHZ
GBA ARM 7DTMI (NO FPU)= .89 DMIPS/MHZ a 40mhz 030, at best then -without a maths unit.

GBA screen= 76.8% of NTSC low resolution, 60% of PAL low.

So bearing in mind that the GBA has no maths unit, and that the 030/50 is probably a bit faster, and that I am talking about plain polygons, and perhaps gouraud, not textured as the 3DO  and GBA throw around, I think your backing up my ideas, thanks very much! :)

*edit* If what your saying about the speed of the 3D0 is true, maybe the Amiga could run something like Star Fighter 3000, I used to love that on the 3D0.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Amiga_Nut on March 31, 2011, 01:42:25 PM
GBA could not run that game anyway. Amiga would never have moved to ARM either, they [Commodore] publicly dismissed this as a possibility.

And to be honest, that game with that level of track/vehicle detail is not even possible on a Playstation1, one of the most efficient custom 3D designs only. 3DO is not very good for polygons like that, just play Starblade(? Namco game) and you will see.

So what you have to ask yourself is....how long would it take for Commodore to be able to produce in a financially viable form a PPC machine as powerful as the £149.99 - £99 Sega Dreamcast? Say £499 is the cut-off point for a home computer without monitor.

Also there was the prototype Hombre chipset which Haynie proclaimed had better 3D potential than the Sega Saturn. This could have been exactly what the doctor ordered :)

Alternatively......maybe someone can tell us about the NatAmi 3D performance, there are some still shots but no videos of the screenshots shown on the website!
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 02:00:46 PM
The GBA can do some impressive stuff, considering it's all CPU driven:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr_DkfO_Csg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5_cnZabhig&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XNo1auSJhY&feature=related

As iv'e said plain polys are an order of magnitiude easier to draw than Texture mapped ones, this is why you see no texture mapped racers on the A500.
The GBA can draw quite good textured+vertex shaded poly environments. It would be able to draw a hell of a lot more polys if it dropped the texture maps.

Same for the Playstation (although it's a GPU equiped machine, made for textured polys, so you only get a x2 performance boost in poly count by dropping texturing).

No plain poly racer was ever released for either of these machines, so i'm not sure how you can say it would not be possible? (not at the quality of the pic I added, certainly).

NatAmi: They reckon an improved 060 at 150mhz last I heard. I'm still skeptical....but not as skeptical as the last few years!  :)

anyway, great discussion! I had hoped some coders would chime in and give us some actual figures.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Hattig on March 31, 2011, 03:00:38 PM
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;626248
Alternatively......maybe someone can tell us about the NatAmi 3D performance, there are some still shots but no videos of the screenshots shown on the website!


Gunnar just posted some N68050 FPU stats - apparently a 100MHz N68050 will perform like a 300 to 800 MHz 68040 in FPU performance depending on how optimised for the N68050 the FPU code is, or a 1.5GHz 486. But that's just based on instruction throughput and latency figures.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: commodorejohn on March 31, 2011, 03:00:52 PM
Quote from: Khephren;626241
@Hattig The ARM 2 was  very powerfull chip. Clocking in at 4 MIPS easy, VS the 68k 1MIP. But these are RISC MIPS, ARM2 had a much simpler instruction set (roughly one third the 68k), where you need to combine some instructions to equal one 68k CISC one. So some your throughput on MIPS are combined instructions. Rough comparison might x2 as powerfull. I would not say any more than that.
I'm not going to claim any numbers knowledge, but the "more instructions per operation" thing isn't all that accurate; as Hattig pointed out, the ARM instruction set is designed around that, so many of the "simpler RISC operations" are built right in as options for any given instruction.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Hattig on March 31, 2011, 03:09:31 PM
Quote from: Khephren;626241
@Hattig The ARM 2 was  very powerfull chip. Clocking in at 4 MIPS easy, VS the 68k 1MIP. But these are RISC MIPS, ARM2 had a much simpler instruction set (roughly one third the 68k), where you need to combine some instructions to equal one 68k CISC one. So some your throughput on MIPS are combined instructions. Rough comparison might x2 as powerfull. I would not say any more than that.

Yep, ARM2 appears to have around 35 instructions, so less than the 68000. Of course with predication you don't need some branches in the code, and you also avoid separate shift instructions as they're built in (and that also reduces the instruction set). As an aside, the 68000 code will be more compact because ARM uses 32-bits per instruction, and 68000 starts at 16. It took until Thumb2 for code density on ARM to match 68000.

We could use benchmark MIPS - like Dhrystone, although of course these have flaws too) ARM2 could get 0.33 DMIPS/MHz (so 2.66 DMIPS for an 8MHz ARM2). I'm having difficulty finding 68000 figures though, although I did see 0.2 DMIPS/MHz for the 68030 mentioned, which could let us assume ~0.1 DMIPS/MHz for the 68000.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 03:25:30 PM
Yes of course, but you cannot entirely mitigate the fact that you have to combine instructions in a RISC architecture (you have two thirds less than a 68k), this is especially true of ported software. Hatiqs initial data that a 12.5mhz 3D0= 25mhz 030 sounds correct. Your RISC nets you a x2 performance increase per clock cycle, with the rest lost during combiner operations.

It's hard to compare the actual machine architectures though. As I pointed out, the 3D0 has a DSP, FPU and twin co-pro's. A 25mhz Amiga will not match this.

The Amiga has bitplane problems, or a chunky convertion overhead.

The GBA is probably the purest CPU renderer, but hampered by a lack of ram.

Doom on an 030/50 will run at a higher resolution, but about the same frame rate as the GBA version, but the GBA version looks worse than it has to because they down rezed the textures, not the CPU's fault in this case. Still not comparing like with like, because the Amiga and GBA versions are optimised for their architectures. Probably as close as we will get though.

@Hattiq
Yes it's very elegant instruction set. That's probably why it's poised for domination :) while having 1/3 the instructions it will not need to combine 3x as much. They were very careful in their instruction choice, and use of branch prediction.

Moto used to quote 1 MIPS standard, 2 MIPS peak at 8Mhz. I always thought they inflated their figures though. 1 MIPS sounds about right, given the Amiga never got the best out of a given processor. So .125DMIPS.

*edit* Iv'e posed the question "what's the render penalty for plain shaded polys VS gouraud VS textured on a CPU bound architecture?"  over at 'the chaos engine' profesional game dev forum. Lots of 3D programmers over there, including some old Amiga guys. I reckon a textured poly is about 8x slower, but it's just a guess..
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: fishy_fiz on March 31, 2011, 03:31:22 PM
roughly:
68000 = 0.1mips per mhz
68030 = 0.3mips per mhz
68040 = 1.1mips per mhz
68060 = 1.33mips per mhz
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Iggy on March 31, 2011, 03:42:07 PM
Quote from: fishy_fiz;626278
roughly:
68000 = 0.1mips per mhz
68030 = 0.3mips per mhz
68040 = 1.1mips per mhz
68060 = 1.33mips per mhz

That's the only valid mips based post in the entire thread.
And, no, early (lower clocked) ARM processors did not outperform Motorola's later (higher clocked) 68K models.
Instead of raw benchmarks or mips figures you need to compare comparable software products running under an OS.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 03:49:22 PM
Doom is the closest iv'e come across. But as I pointed out, they are each optimised for their platform :(   MIPS are not really all that valid between architectures. We could compare Archie games, but as most were ported from amiga CISC to Acorn RISC, that would be a bit unfair.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Hattig on March 31, 2011, 06:27:52 PM
Quote from: Iggy;626283
That's the only valid mips based post in the entire thread.
And, no, early (lower clocked) ARM processors did not outperform Motorola's later (higher clocked) 68K models.
Instead of raw benchmarks or mips figures you need to compare comparable software products running under an OS.


Nobody has claimed that early low clocked ARM CPUs would outperform later 68000 CPUs! ARM2 came out in 1986, around the same time as the 68030, so the fact that they perform similarly isn't shocking (although the ARM does it in a fraction of the transistor count).

There's 68000 MIPS and there's DMIPS which allows better comparison between architectures. I guess there's CoreMark too.

Not that it matters today.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 07:22:13 PM
course it matters, most of us now own machines that are over 20 years old, but still love talking about this stuff ;)

Anyway, i don't think the original archie ARM2 was a match for an 030, if thats what your getting at :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Franko on March 31, 2011, 08:18:24 PM
While it's not a 3D polygon shaded game or anything of that ilk, The Settlers on the Amiga is a perfect example of what a well written and highly optimised machine specific piece of code can do... :)

Even on a basic 020 A1200 when you consider the amount of calculations going on, both onscreen and offscreen (up to 65535 characters/people per player) then it really goes to show just what a well written piece of code can achieve even on a lowly 020... :)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Tripitaka on March 31, 2011, 08:22:43 PM
@Bloodline

Any chance of an Amiga version of Puny Humans? I know it's a touchscreen game but it could still work with a mouse.

If you don't have the time to DIY maybe someone else would be willing to port.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Hattig on March 31, 2011, 09:21:37 PM
Quote from: Khephren;626326
course it matters, most of us now own machines that are over 20 years old, but still love talking about this stuff ;)

Anyway, i don't think the original archie ARM2 was a match for an 030, if thats what your getting at :)


Heh, nope, not if it took a 12.5MHz ARM60 to match a ~25MHz 68030 ...

Maybe the 8MHz ARM2 would have matched the 16MHz 68030 crippled with 16-bit bus in the Atari Falcon! But really it was more like a ~20Mhz 68000.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Digiman on March 31, 2011, 09:40:30 PM
I had Super Stardust side by side on 120mhz Pentium and A1200 running side by sie, no difference. That was the most impressive difference I ever saw. Bit of lag if joystick used on P120 but same if keyboard was used so 133mhz Pentium.

Polygons in 64 or more colours however......
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on March 31, 2011, 10:03:02 PM
Quote from: Hattig;626357
Maybe the 8MHz ARM2 would have matched the 16MHz 68030 crippled with 16-bit bus in the Atari Falcon!.

lol yeah, I like the falcon though. Borg that with an A1200, i'd have been happy!

I almost bought an Archie A3010 by mistake you know, thought it was an A1200 in the shop, only when he asked for £500 that I realised it wasn't the new A1200 :)

@Digiman
Yeah, we can use c2p we have to.  Lord Riton over at eab has got a HAM8 engine going, it's pretty nice. Doubt we'd need that many colours, i'm talking about plain polys after all. If we use shading, then maybe.

I got some feed back from the chaos engine game dev site (not as much as i would have liked):

"with a plain poly you can just write the same colour to each part of the scanline the poly covers. There are no calculations or lookups when writing a scanline and often depending on the raw bitplane formats you can write multiple pixels at once.

for gouraud shading you need to calculate the start and end colours for each scanline and interpolate between them, worst case is you lose the ability to write multiple pixels at once but depending on how much memory you have to play with you may be able to still do this.

for texture mapping you have to work out start and end pixels in the texture (these may not be on the same vertical or horizontal line) and then write these out to the correct scan line(s) with possibly variable scaling in the x. This can get nasty if you have polys which have too much throw in the z.


you're probably safe saying each is an order of magnitude slower than the last.
Also performance is dependant on poly size and small polys will look better than big ones."

Also:
 well I know *wink wink* that one of the coders in our demo group is working on a flatshade engine that'll run ~15,000 polys on 060. Without all the trimmings of a game, obviously (Loonies)
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: fishy_fiz on April 01, 2011, 03:12:35 AM
I see a lot of references to c2p use lately, but it's really not necessary, and Id suggest even counter productive for some stuff. Up to 32/64 colors , even using polygon based gfx can probably be made more efficient without it, even higher color depths in the right hands for the right type of softwre.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on April 01, 2011, 12:52:07 PM
Yeah, if your doing a plain polygon racer, 32 or 64 would suffice. If your using vertex shading, then you would need a higher colour depth. I don't know what the performance hit is for conversion.

I guess for anything moving the screen as one entity, with a high bit depth, would benefit.
Anything in less colours, or scrolling, could be done with the normal hardware.
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Iggy on April 01, 2011, 01:23:56 PM
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Etvideogamecover.jpg
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Khephren on April 01, 2011, 01:27:37 PM
Iggy, you've lost me!
Title: Re: Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?
Post by: Iggy on April 01, 2011, 01:30:53 PM
Quote from: Khephren;626518
Iggy, you've lost me!

The future! the future of rock and roll man? Bruce Springsteen.
He's f*cking it up. He's f*cking it all up.