Why I want an A-Eon X5000

[fishy_fiz]

Heh, by the time its available ram and graphics cards will have to be sourced either 2nd hand or as NOS, so the whole buying new as an advantage needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
AMD have already moved on from S.I, and ddr3-1333 is somewhat archaic.


Not that this will detract from the user experience. My 5 year old 4ghz quad core AROS box is still great fun, despite being 2nd hand and massively outdated. If the x5000 can reach even %25 of that systems performance then its almost at that bare minimum for modern computing type level.

[fishy_fiz]

There's many enhancements to the quake1 engine these days.
The Dark Skies engine being a good example. Although this was ported to OS4 already, the current os4 build looks horrible compard to the AROS version(and other systems with pixel shaders and proper ht&l).

Additionally mipmapping existed in hardware 15+ years ago. Its far from a modern feature.

Point to this..... nothing really. Just pointing out some errors in previous posts.

[fishy_fiz]

@amigakit.

Yes, Im aware existing Dark Places for OS4 uses old w3d. This is why I said "current build" (talk about futility though,... porting software whos entire reason foe existing is graphical effects on a system that supports none of the enhancements).

Its a good candidate for an update though. Really looks quite nice with all the eye candy enabled.

Was reading some old pc magazines yesterday. Amazing how quickly time flies. Hard to believe first fully programmable pixel shaders appeard in hardware 15 years ago (gf3). Hardware t&l is approaching 20 years.
This w3d overhaul is well overdue. I can only hope MOS follows suite. While reasonable speed wise for an altenative os on obsolete hardware the 3d system there is quite archaic.

[fishy_fiz]

In regards to emulation speed, the truth lay somewhere in between what people have suggested so far.
On a high-end, new pc interger performance of emulated system probably eclipses any available "amiga" hadware. FPU performance however is more in line with old phase5 ppc cards.
UAEGFX now also works with os4/ppc, and apparently also supports compositioning. Voodoo3 support is also coming (old h/w, yes, but mentioned for sake of thoroughness).

Given time winuae will surpass any real hardware in pretty much any measurement, exactly as it did when amiga was 68k. Its already a viable option.
And contrary to how it may sound Im not particularly endorsing it to anyone. Nor am I denouncing it. Im simply stating how things are.