AmigaOS 4.x to support about 180 Graphics card chips

[Rogue]

Sorry, blame us for the last year, but leave out the rest. We are not responsible for what happened before that.

[Rogue]

Yeah, sure. You ought to know, right? We're just a bunch of idiot that have hacked together 3D drivers more or less by accident.

Yes, the drivers are 2D. Yes, some of the supported chipsets are older once, that is because SNAP does support a *wide* range of cards. They go up to the latest offerings from Matrox, ATI and nVidia.

How long the 3D drivers take is something that you cannot judge. I know that absence of knowledge usually doesn't stop people from posting about it. But please don't try to put us up as idiots, and most of all not SciTech, which are a very professional company with lots of experience in this field.

[Rogue]

anyway how many chips do we actually need to have supported to make a viable os? 3? ATI,MATROX and Nvidia?

I bet you wouldn't be asking this question if you had a Voodoo 5 or a Permedia 2...

[Rogue]

Well the probably biggest problem however is that  most of the gfx card drivers of SNAP for advanced  cards are probably based on object files  provided by the card manufactures and these are  only available for x86 and not ppc.  

Where does it say so?

[Rogue]

I am ranting at whoever wrote he waited four years for OS 4. Like I said, we're on it for a year, not four.

[Rogue]

Would you enlighten us as to why you think that way? Or where you'd get your information from?

[Rogue]

OK, I need to start quoting the stuff I am ranting about...

mikeymike wrote:
Try not to read into everything with such over-riding optimism - just because SciTech have written stuff supporting over 170 graphics cards, it doesn't mean AmigaOS4 will support anywhere near that many.

Perhaps you can enlighten me as to where you get your inside information from?

I am really a bit confused now. You say, "no they won't support that many", others say "you don't need that many"... What now?

[Rogue]

Tafka wrote:
Typical, just after I ordered a Radeon 9100.

 :-)

You know that a Radeon 9100 is actually a relabelled 8500?

[Rogue]

whatever work these SciTech guys have done so far will have to be adapted to A1/AOS4 as drivers have to have a lot of per-system optimisations

Didn't it occur to you that the system-adaption part is very easy? That this might be one of the actual selling points for SNAP. Again, what part of "OS-agnostic" is so hard to comprehend?

it doesn't mean that AmigaOS4 instantly has driver support for all the cards that SciTech have done work for.

Any sort of reasoning to back this up, or do you admit at making a wild guess? You don't know very much about SNAP, or do you?

what if their work on some of the graphics chipsets out of this "170" quoted number were guarded with confidentiality agreements of sorts, that they weren't allowed to use the work for other projects/companies

What if their work doesn't, and is completely their own? What if I never need to actually see the driver source code?

[Rogue]

its just more 'talk' and we've seen 'talk' for years now.

Sorry, mips_proc, as I said before blame whoever you want for "years". Blame us for one "year". Talking isn't a bad thing at all if work is being done in parallel, and there *is* work being done, much more than ever before.

[Rogue]

But this also brings up the second issue of AOS4 I don't like, inconsistancy. Which API will coders have to use, P96 or SNAP?  

If you have a look at the SNAP sdk, you will find out that this is no API for high-level graphics. As its name implies, it is a driver system, and as such it is not intended to be used directly, in the same sense as SCSI device is not used to read files from disk.

SNAP will be integrated as a monitor driver under Picasso96. The original graphics library and the Picasso96 API will be used, like before. Plans are to extend the graphics system starting at 4.1, and eventually replace it and provide an interface for backwards compatibility.

There is nothing inconsistant about this. You where just jumping to conclusions.

I agree that many of the 180 graphics chips supported will probably never be used in an AmigaOne (TSENG ET4000 anyone), but that is actually not the point. The point is, *if* you want to buy a graphics card, or happen to have one in your hand, chances are that you will find it mentioned on a 180 entry list, as opposed to a list of only 5 or so cards.

Also, no one ever claimed that these will be supported with 3D drivers (again the ET 4000 doesn't even have a 3D core). However, the same problem would arise if we or Alexander and Tobias would need to write the 2D drivers, only that we would also be burdened with that one. And, as the press release also states, we are cooperating with SciTech on this, so anything done on their part also benefits OS 4 customers.

[Rogue]

One thing that always bothers me is that people complain about the 3D drivers taking soo much longer ("years of planning" etc ad nauseam). I would like to ask, though, what is the difference between now and before? If SciTech SNAP wouldn't have been chosen, we would have to do both the 2D and 3D drivers. How come that some people take 180 graphics drivers for 2D as a sign that 3D will be massively delayed? That is one thing that I can't get into my head. Perhaps someone can enlighten me...  :-)

[Rogue]

mips_proc wrote:
Rogue my point is I'll believe everything when I see it...AOS4 was supposed to be done by how many due dates so far?... I'll believe it when I see it... I think its great to 'hear' that  180 graphics chips will have 2D... but I'd rather 'see' it .

And my point was that if you want to blame us, blame us for those release dates that we actually missed. We are working on this for slightly above a year now, and in that year, more has been done on OS 4 than ever before. That is what counts, and that is why it will be available at one day.

Anyway, you will see that I never mention a release date anymore. But now I will announce it. Yes, I will tell you when AmigaOS 4 will be ready:

[color=FF0000]:flame: WHEN IT'S DONE! :destroy:[/color][/b]

There you have it. Can't I be more precise?  :-D