Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?

[Amiga_Nut]

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

[Amiga_Nut]

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?

[Amiga_Nut]

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.

[Amiga_Nut]

@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.

[Amiga_Nut]

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.

[Amiga_Nut]

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!