Frogger is slow on my MMU '030 playing VCD

[whabang]

gizz72 wrote:
Greetings whabang,

My old 486 @ 66 MHz could do it with halved quality, so it should do fine on an overclocked 040, or a 060.

Yes I agree. The old 486 does play video better. Thanks to VGA cards. :-)

Regards,

Gizz

Of course. Not having a gfx-board on your Amiga would make things even slower.

BTW, did you know that AMD's 486-DX4s performed better per cycle, than the early P4s? :-)

[minator]

My old 486 @ 66 MHz could do it with halved quality, so it should do fine on an overclocked 040, or a 060.

PC Gfx cards have done hardware decoding of MPEG for many years now, it's faster on the 486 because the 486 isn't doing the decoding.

This works on Windows but not all other OSs have drivers for the hardware.
If it's running another OS, playing an MPEG movie on my Athlon (800MHz) will eat most of the CPU power - thats how compute intensive MPEGs are.

BTW, did you know that AMD's 486-DX4s performed better per cycle, than the early P4s?

Not at all, the P4 is a very inefficient processor, if you clock it the same as other x86s (P3, K7) the P4 comes out 25-30% slower than the others.

[Lemmink]

If you have a zorro based Amiga you could look for one of those rare Peggy+ cards (it`s the zorry counterpart of the FMV Module) I had no problem playing a VideoCD with that card in fullscreen with syncrone sound on an A4000/030 with just onboard RAM off of a 2x IDE CD-ROM.

[patrik]

@gizz72:

You can find the Peggy+ card Lemmink is talking about here for 300 SEK which is about 30 EUR.


/Patrik

[whabang]

minator wrote:
PC Gfx cards have done hardware decoding of MPEG for many years now, it's faster on the 486 because the 486 isn't doing the decoding.

Yes it did. I can't really tell if it skipped some frames or not (didn't notice it if it did), and the audio quality really sucked (11 kHz, mono), but it did run. IIRC, I used Xing MPEG-player back then.

My old Cirrus Logic-card sure as hell didn't have HW-acceleration.

The file I particularily remember playing, was the Weezer-video that was on the Windows 95-CD.



You aren't mixing VCD up with SVCD, are you? MPEG2-streams take a lot more power.

[whabang]

Gizz:
I just came to think of something:
Which IDE/SCSI-comtroller are you using? Transfers can eat a lot of CPU-power, if you don't use DMA.

[whabang]

Not at all, the P4 is a very inefficient processor, if you clock it the same as other x86s (P3, K7) the P4 comes out 25-30% slower than the others.

Hehe!
I remember the launch of the 1.6 GHz Tulatin CPU being cancelled, because it kicked the P4s ass too bad! :-D


Just checked the old review. It was running at 1.49 GHz.

[darksun9210]

yeah even an 060 will baulk at playing back VCD (unless half quality etc. etc.). best get a PPC card + gfx card combo.

if not, and you have a lot of hard disk space that you don't know what to do with. you can decode the MPEG stream into an ANIM file, or bunch of frames, and extract the audio into an AIFF, then you should be able to chuck it all into a CDXL file. an EC020 with no fast ram will play a CDXL

[Crumb]

486 also had faster gfx bus... and some cirrus logic cards accelerate slightly MPEG videos thanks to their YUV modes (AFAIK it's the mode used by RiVA/Moovid to make the Picasso4 slightly faster)

[Karlos]

For enjoyable non-hardware based mpeg decoding on a miggy you need

1) A fast, DMA driven drive. PIO will suck the CPU dry even before you start decoding anything.

2) As fast a CPU as you can get with the largest bandwidth memory access you can manage. Nothing less than a good 060 (CS MK3 or CSPPC with 64-bit bus access is about as good as classic 680x0/PPC will get) will have sufficient power. A lot of number crunching is involved.

3) The fastest possible graphics bus you can get. Basic 640x480x16bpp video at 25fps requires 14.7 MB/s.

I've studied the results of quite a few classic amigas and TBH, the only cards I have seen that can sustain this kind of continious copy speed (or beter) from fast RAM to VRAM are the BVisionPPC/CVisionPPC and some PCI cards running on GRexx. The majority of mediator and prometheus systems seem to max out at about 8-10MB/s for this kind of operation.

Of course a lower resolution helps; 320x240x32bpp at 25fps (which needs 7MB/s copy speed) is achievable by pretty much all existing cards.

Some cards, notably those that support overlays and such can accelerate some aspects of video playback. Overlays can typically use YUV data directly and perform scaling which saves the CPU a lot of work.

[whabang]

Crumb wrote:
486 also had faster gfx bus... and some cirrus logic cards accelerate slightly MPEG videos thanks to their YUV modes (AFAIK it's the mode used by RiVA/Moovid to make the Picasso4 slightly faster)

Aye!
IIRC, the VESA-bus is three times as fast as the ISA-bus, which is already faster than the Zorro II-bus.

My Cirrus-card didn't have YUV-modes (Heck! The first year it didn't even have Windows 95-drivers :-P), but it would prolly have increased speed even more.

[whabang]

An interesting thim is that there were some DMA IDE-controllers for the PC, but until UDMA appeared, they were never popular because they wasn't very fast. I remember getting one of those fancy VESA IDE-controllers with on-board cache only to discover that my old controller used much less CPU-power.
Too bad it was slow as hell. :\

[Crumb]

[HotRod]

I agree, The Power Flyer is eating to much CPU-time that even watching some SVCDs are slow. The internal IDE-port got DMA but have too slow transfer-rate so your best bet would be a SCSI-solution.

[Karlos]

@crumb

You have to make sure you write your data to VRAM in the widest possible units to get a fast throughput. For 24-bit packed pixels (3 bytes per pixel) that can be a bit of an arse to do - you'd ideally want to buffer some amount of data thats a common multiple of 3 and 4 bytes and shove it along as 32-bit words (well, for zorro3 at least - I expect it makes less difference for zorro2 cards). For 68040/60 I found that move16 works well on quite a few z3 / PCI cards :-)

[Hyperspeed]

Okay, you've all lost the plot!

The original question was VideoCD on an '030... classic chipset too
by the look of it!

As a percentage of the 6 million Amigas out there, how many have a
Cyberstorm PowerPC or a PCI interface!?

Desktop Amiga users were pitifully neglected when it came to graphics
cards. Everyone made every sort of gizmo available but the next most
important thing of all (after hard disk and accelerator/RAM) was never
provided for!

The only real option for desktop A1200 owners was to cram in the
useless AteoBus Pixel64 or win the lottery and buy a PPC/BVision
combo.

Why was the Amiga's integrated image so savaged in the recent years?
Everyone loves the classic `wedge' design and to put your A1200 in a
tower basically does away with it's unique product design.

What happens then is that slowly PC owners will wear you down by
comparing your machine (now in a PC case) to their super-machine. All
the time Apple sneaks through the back door with an integrated machine
called `iMac'...

See where I'm getting?
Hold your guns Amiga owners, oh and throw out your WinUAE!

Anyway, did you download and try the 2x RiVA links I posted? It was
updated about a month ago so it may well support fast VCD playing on
AGA.

:-D :-D :-D :-D