A-EON Technology secures graphic card support for AmigaOS 4

[AmigoSteve]

Ok, so my question is as follows...

I have a sam460 lite system bought from amigakit. I guess that means I don't get the drivers free.
 However the card I got with the machine is the 4650. Before I pay for driver support I would like to know if this card will be supported to the final version and if I will get 3d support for it without having to shell out even more money for os4.2?

[eliyahu]

Acube did the right thing.

While it may be entirely confusing to even imagine, I've been contemplating picking up a SAM 460 board to replace my SAM 440ep.  Once the announcement came out that I'd have to pay for video drivers for the more modern cards, it soured my attitude to the point I crossed the 460 purchase off the list when this news first came out.  Merely a matter of principle.  My 440 works fine, but obviously is the low end of the SAM mobos.  I'd enjoy the 460, but by no means do I *need* the horsepower it offers

Yeah, I realize it's on'y a $30 payment, but it wasn't about the money.  Just as I would not buy a commodity PC/mobo/gfx card and readily pay a gfx card manfacturer for gfx drivers, I wasn't willing to do so with the SAM.  The things are expensive enough without having to shell out more money.  After ACube's latest announcement, I'll likely pick a 460 up in the upcoming month or so.

you can i are on the same page.  i've also wanted to replace my SAM440 with a SAM460, but the poor software support has kept me from 'pulling the trigger' on the purchase. no 3D support, no DMA support for the on-board SATA interface, no final driver for on-board audio, no video acceleration, etc. all of which i have on my SAM440.

so i think the peg2 or even an A1-XE makes more sense, at least until OS4.2 ships -- and i certainly don't expect that anytime soon. :nervous:

-- eliyahu

[Derfs]

Ok, so my question is as follows...

I have a sam460 lite system bought from amigakit. I guess that means I don't get the drivers free.
 However the card I got with the machine is the 4650. Before I pay for driver support I would like to know if this card will be supported to the final version and if I will get 3d support for it without having to shell out even more money for os4.2?

you only need to buy this 'new' driver if you want to use a 5xxx or 6xxx card, or 7xxx in the future. you get the same feature for those newer cards as you do for your 4650.

3d support either way will only come with os4.2

no point buying it if you ask me

[Crumb]

no point buying it if you ask me

+1.

Translation to overlay explanations by OS4-Team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

[antikk]

Looking forward to see your blue Prius flying. :banana:

Yeah, that is how overlay is supported on BVision but it still doesnt give overlay support to current Radeon HD drivers. My car could be a UFO if it had wings.

[Derfs]

+1.

Translation to overlay explanations by OS4-Team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

no point 'for him' not in general

you will have to point out where this so called os4 team have said overlay wouldn't be nice to have, hans is only one person and has priorities and overlay is way down on that list

[Karlos]

No, it is just silly. Emulating overlay using OpenGL is old story.

Who said anything about emulating overlay with OpenGL? It's not as if we're talking about decoding each frame as an RGB texture and passing that to OpenGL. What I am describing is video texturing, in which the GPU directly applies YUV formatted data as a texture to a primitive, doing the YUV -> RGB conversion directly. This is a hardware level feature that even the old Permedia2 supported. Many OpenGL implementations (not necessarily on Amiga) expose this functionality and, of course, are able to emulate it for those that don't.

[itix]

Who said anything about emulating overlay with OpenGL? It's not as if we're talking about decoding each frame as an RGB texture and passing that to OpenGL. What I am describing is video texturing, in which the GPU directly applies YUV formatted data as a texture to a primitive, doing the YUV -> RGB conversion directly. This is a hardware level feature that even the old Permedia2 supported.

I was thinking that you can already achieve it on Amiga by using current OpenGL functionality. Of course it doesnt have to be exposed via OpenGL (only). BVision and CVision boards expose overlay support using standard overlay API on Amiga and users dont have to know how it works under the hood.

Btw

- Overlay typically occludes framebuffer and can't be part of any graphics pipeline or windowing architecture. It's basically "on top" or not at all.

Not really true, at least on Amiga. Overlay works with windowing and compositing just fine.

Heh, I just remember that good old never released Dragon2 even implemented overlay emulation so you could expose two mplayers with overlay simultaneously... it was only software based and quite slow but it worked

[Karlos]

I was thinking that you can already achieve it on Amiga by using current OpenGL functionality.

Right, that would indeed be possible. I'm not sure it would be particularly fast on current MiniGL implementations though. First of all, you'd probably have to do the YUV -> RGB conversion yourself. Then, the texture you'd generate would be converted to some underlying Warp3D format, which amongst other things, will impose a 2^n width and height restraint on it, which implies further software conversion (width modulus expansion for example). The hardware 3D driver may then expect the resulting texture to be formatted in some special manner intended for faster texturing (subpatching, for example), where what you really want in this case is to render the texture with the least amount of fuss, then replace it with the next frame ad infinitum. With the sole exception of output scaling, I can actually see it being a slower than a software only implementation at this stage.

Of course it doesnt have to be exposed via OpenGL (only). BVision and CVision boards expose overlay support using standard overlay API on Amiga and users dont have to know how it works under the hood.

Precisely. As I recall, it was cgxvirgin.library that supported it, if you enabled a LAYER=DESTRUCTIVE tooltype in the monitor driver or something (I don't recall exactly). You could tell it was a textured triangle fan when you made the window large enough, occasionally you could see the leading diagonal when the video wasn't properly synced.

Not really true, at least on Amiga. Overlay works with windowing and compositing just fine.

Then you aren't using an overlay (at least not a traditional one). A hardware overlay, by definition, is not part of the current frame buffer any more than a hardware mouse cursor is. Modern overlays, however, tend to be implemented in a manner not unlike the Permedia2 did and as such can integrate nicely into a proper windowing environment.

Heh, I just remember that good old never released Dragon2 even implemented overlay emulation so you could expose two mplayers with overlay simultaneously... it was only software based and quite slow but it worked

Sounds fun

[stefcep2]

This is a propriatory OS running on propriatory hardware.  So why are people comparing it to the Windows world with "free" drivers?  A more appropriate comparison is Apple.  AFAIK Apple doesn't charge extra for video drivers, but you do pay more compared to a comparably-specced Windows PC. Also AmigaOS doesn't have the economy of scale that Apple does.

Not sure why people insist on telling others how they should spend their money either.

[itix]

Precisely. As I recall, it was cgxvirgin.library that supported it, if you enabled a LAYER=DESTRUCTIVE tooltype in the monitor driver or something (I don't recall exactly). You could tell it was a textured triangle fan when you made the window large enough, occasionally you could see the leading diagonal when the video wasn't properly synced.

Yup, VLAYER=DESTRUCTIVE.

Then you aren't using an overlay (at least not a traditional one). A hardware overlay, by definition, is not part of the current frame buffer any more than a hardware mouse cursor is. Modern overlays, however, tend to be implemented in a manner not unlike the Permedia2 did and as such can integrate nicely into a proper windowing environment.

Nope. Technically you are correct but it can also work with windowing and compositing. Remember that weird (pink?) colour you can see in screenshots from programs using an overlay? It is for colour keying that screenshot application found from a window bitmap where a hardware overlay was supposed to be. When colour keying is enabled the overlay data is only visible where this colour is found. If an overlay window is behind another window its colour key backfill is also destroyed and no overlay data is displayed there.

Similarly if you render text to an overlay backfill and have subtitles in a video application, for example.

[Karlos]

Yup, VLAYER=DESTRUCTIVE.

Yep, that one, even.

Nope. Technically you are correct but it can also work with windowing and compositing. Remember that weird (pink?) colour you can see in screenshots from programs using an overlay? It is for colour keying that screenshot application found from a window bitmap where a hardware overlay was supposed to be. When colour keying is enabled the overlay data is only visible where this colour is found. If an overlay window is behind another window its colour key backfill is also destroyed and no overlay data is displayed there.

This is a slightly different use case again - not all hardware from the era where overlay was a common feature supported chromakeyed overlays (technically, it's an "underlay", the overlay pixels are rendered only where the chroma key colour is found in the framebuffer). A lot of them simply provided a rectangular overlay that was rendered directly and would appear op top and that was it. An application would position the overlay to fit within it's window border, but if you then dragged another window in front, the overlay would occlude the overlapping portion. I have several old PC graphics cards that did that

[takemehomegrandma]

@Karlos

It's 2012. Overlays are pretty much obsolete.
...
...
...

There is talk of overlay in SO many threads, there is a current discussion on Amigaworld.net that details some valid points.

I'll paste the original posts (credit Amigaworld.net):

Crumb said:

The current problem is that current software uses overlay and current drivers for PCIe cards don´t provide it and probably won´t for a very long time. With advanced GPUs it´s even possible to develop a video player that decodes the stream without relying much in the cpu but doesn´t mean you have that kind of player and that kind of drivers.

If Hans has need years to finish basic drivers with only 2D acceleration you can guess he´ll need many more years to implement proper 3D acceleration.

The problem is not so much HOW overlay is implemented but if it IS implemented. If there´s no form of overlay API compatibility that will only lead to poor performance on video playback.

Of course having both overlay and overlay emulation using a texture is better but saying "bah! overlay is obsolete" makes me wonder why you are still using obsolete OSes that can´t even play videos properly (and that only use one core and that lack memory protection).

PS: Just in case you have not understood it: rejecting overlay means you won´t be able to watch videos properly in your Sam460 for many years because 3d support won´t come anytime soon, and after 3d support they would have to emulate overlay and even with that emulation it would be slower than real overlay.

Let´s see current situation:
-no 3d drivers for PCIe cards, years spent on developing simple 2d drivers
-no overlay emulation using textures
-no real overlay
-no compromise nor timeframe for 3d drivers
-no compromise nor timeframe for overlay emulation using 3d drivers

so It´s very funny you talk about playing DVDs and watching flash videos when current systems are totally unable to do that. I wonder if users really use the OS or just spend the day dreaming about new features.

Putting in man-hours to support overlay now just doesn't make sense.

Putting man hours developing 2d drivers for cards that won´t allow you to run 3d apps nor videos makes me wonder why would anyone want to buy something different than R9200/256MB.

Following the logic of those praising Hans words I wonder why you don´t shout "using cpu to play videos is obsolete, we´ll use GPU to play videos" and wait for years until some linux player is released.

Tomas said:

I am no developer or expert, but no overlay will afaik result in no vsync in videos as well. So I would say that it is pretty important if that is the case.
And from experience no overlay also severely reduces video quality due to not having proper scaling.

Nikosidis said:

Gallium 3D is far behind in both support and performance. I read somewhere that they are working on hardware video accelleration, but as far as I know it is not working as it supposed to yet.

Crumb said:

Overlay is obsolete

really? that´s why all OS4 players use OpenGL to output graphics? oh wait! all OS4 players (DvPlayer, MPlayer, AMP2...) use Overlay in order to play videos with decent performance. Then I´m sorry for poor OS4 PCie users who believed all the propaganda that have to use drivers so primitive that don´t even provide a way to play videos smoothly. If overlay is obsolete then all AmigaOS4 players are too. BTW, using a 3d texture is also obsolete since the video stream can be decoded by the gpu instead of the cpu. AmigaOS4 PCIe drivers don´t support any video acceleration, that´s sad as Amiga used to be a superb platform for multimedia.

the fact that new cards don't suport overlay

The fact is that OS4 drivers don´t support any video acceleration, not that newer cards don´t include overlay or any alternative way to produce the same result.

Modern OSes also support multicore and have memory protection, that should give you a clue about how ridiculous it sounds that an user of a computer that is unable to play videos smoothly claims "overlay" is obsolete.

It seems you don´t understand that the problem is not HOW overlay is implemented but that it is not supported at all and all AmigaOS4 players include overlay support but don´t output using vapourware gallium nor vaporware gpu stream decoding. OS4 players use P96 PIP api, in case you don´t know it.

Now take your FUD elsewhere.

says the one who claims overlay is obsolete and lacks a computer that can play videos smoothly but shouts that Gallium&Mesa (that are not ported and it seems obvious that they won´t do it in a reasonable time and will leave users with PCIe cards without possibility of playing videos smoothly) will help to fix that.

OSes that support Overlay (or an api compatible alternative) are playing videos smoothly.

Do you know Aesop´s fable about the fox and the grapes? We could make a new version called "the os4 fanatic and the oportunity of playing videos smoothly".

It could start like this: once upon a time, the os4 user "sundown" bought a computer and tried to play an os4 presentation video from a fellow amigan. The video jumped and jumped and couldn´t be played smoothly. He paid for some updated videos and the video still frameskipped and frameskipped. Bah! -said our dear amigan- Overlay is obsolete... who needs to play videos?

Jupp3 said:

Currently, older cards (f.ex. Radeon 9250, Radeon 9200, Radeon 9100 and Radeon 9000, in ascending performance order) offer more features (at least some have 3D support and Overlay, but not sure which ones), and I doubt 2D would be THAT much faster on newer cards, that it would make it better. The only reasons I can see for getting a new model instead:
1)The computer lacks suitable bus to which connect the older card.
2)For some reason, user cannot find suitable old card on ebay etc.

If user gets a new card:
-There's no knowing when there will be some "done-in-GPU" scaling option, be it overlay or anything else.
-I think an (emulated) overlay support should be a lot easier to implement than "full MESA based OpenGL implementation" that's the current aim (temporary solution + compatibility with old programs)
-If user wants to get the best card available for whenever proper drivers (including 3D) become available, there might be lots of better cards available at that time when it finally happens (although some of them probably would need bigger changes to drivers)

As for "other options for scaling", MPlayer already has (at least) 2 OpenGL based video drivers. Not sure if they would need a lot of changes, but assuming it's "all fixed mode OpenGL", it might work even with MiniGL without much changes. Might still have dependencies on X11 etc, never checked.

Also, this is definitely (not made any actual tests, just using common sense) a lot slower than overlay (need to do pixel format conversion (at least without shaders), probably other slowdowns aswell) - but once the frame is in OpenGL texture(s), the scaling is practically free. So if most time would be spent scaling the image, this might be faster and "less worse" than CPU-based scaling.

MorphOS version doesn't have that built in, in any case that wouldn't make ANY sense at all, since all cards that tinygl supports probably also support overlay...

Sorry about posting the quotes, but often people do not follow links and I think this issue has importance to most people here.

start of discussion in case it continues there

[amigacooke]

Oh dear, same old trolls fighting over the dung heap. No wonder I and the vast majority of Amiga users left the platform years ago.

[takemehomegrandma]

Spectre660 said:

Results from A Sam440ep-Flex 800 with Radeon HD4800 via PCIE adapter [No Overlay!]

WorkBench:> Programs:Video/DvPlayer/DvPlayer verbose
Media :My Videos/DVDS/Viewed/Limitless {2011} DVDRIP.avi
Video: AVI, 720 x 304, 23.98 fps
Audio: 01 [MP3] 16-bit 44100 Hz, Stereo
Total Nr of Frames: 4358
Nr of Frames played: 1514
Nr of Frames skipped: 2844 (66%)
Total Playback Time: 181.746 seconds
Average Framerate: 23.978 fps
Displayed Framerate: 8.330 fps

Results from Same machine with Radeon 9250 and overlay.

8.WorkBench:> Programs:Video/DvPlayer/DvPlayer verbose
Media :My Videos/DVDS/Viewed/Limitless {2011} DVDRIP.avi
Video: AVI, 720 x 304, 23.98 fps
Audio: 01 [MP3] 16-bit 44100 Hz, Stereo
Total Nr of Frames: 4364
Nr of Frames played: 4364
Nr of Frames skipped: 0 (0%)
Total Playback Time: 182.037 seconds
Average Framerate: 23.973 fps
Displayed Framerate: 23.973 fps

sundown said:

Heres what I get on the x1000 with a Radeon HD 4850, no overlay.

6.Videos:> work:tools/DvPlayer/DvPlayer verbose
Videos:Red Planet.avi
Video: AVI, 720 x 304, 23.98 fps
Audio: 01 [AC3] 16-bit 48000 Hz, Stereo
Total Nr of Frames: 4294
Nr of Frames played: 4293
Nr of Frames skipped: 1 (1%)
Total Playback Time: 179.028 seconds
Average Framerate: 23.985 fps
Displayed Framerate: 23.980 fps

Conclusion:

It's obvious that not even the X1000, the fastest OS4 machine on the planet, can play DVD-resolution video without frame skipping without overlay (just forget about HD video)! While 1 skipped frame in a 3 minute clip isn't a lot, it still signals that the HW is at its very limits of what is possible! This is really an eye-brow raiser! The impact of having overlay and not having overlay is strikingly obvious when looking at the numbers above, yet they scream "obsolete" at the solution that actually works and exists - a fact which I have to agree with the other posters above - is hilarious! :lol:

As a reference: MorphOS mplayer (with proper overlay of course) does 720p HD on a $150 Mac Mini. *Today*, not in two years. Given the fact that their fastest OS4 machine struggles with DVD resolution (without overlay), this must surely feel like Pure Science Fiction to those OS4 users calling overlay obsolete.

"Obsolete"...

:lol:

[haywirepc]

Nr of Frames skipped: 2844 (66%)

Wow thats bad. Yes I think overlay is needed.