AMIGA Graphics card question:

[barney]

Are there any PC graphics cards that can be used on an Amiga in Workbench.  I am just curious if this is possible.  Thanks.

Barney

[Flashlab]

Yes, you can use S3 Virge, Voodoo Banshee, 3, 4 and 5 cards and Radeon 9200 and 9250 cards with Elbox PCI boards for example. Other PCI solutions mostly limit their support to only Voodoo 3 cards.

[alexh]

There are non which can be used directly

[Flashlab]

There are non which can be used directly

I didn't mention that because the stock Amigas lack PCI slots and I thought that would be clear.

[Karlos]

I didn't mention that because the stock Amigas lack PCI slots and I thought that would be clear.

It might not be to someone unfamiliar with the machine hardware. Additional note, you also need driver software. To some extent, what you use will be determined by which PCI bus expansion you use.

[Flashlab]

That's why I'm glad that alexh mentioned it; I sometimes get some tunnelvision because I happen to know my Amiga ;-).

And it's true that card support differs with each PCI solution; I mentioned that in my first answer. The Mediator from Elbox gives you the most options to choose from.

[rkauer]

And soon another Radeon card will follow...

http://hdrlab.org.nz/radeonhd-driver/

[Tahoe]

And soon another Radeon card will follow...

That sounds very interesting indeed!
I had a quick look at the page, looks like they are developing a driver for OS4.x though, not for classic Amiga's so to say.

BTW, now that we are on the subject, is there any chance to get a Radeon working woth Prometheus? Some OpenPCI type driver maybe?

[Karlos]

And soon another Radeon card will follow...

http://hdrlab.org.nz/radeonhd-driver/

That's very cool.

If only nVidia were as open to the developer community That said, I don't imagine any of the current CUDA capable cards are available in AGP form factors.

[wawrzon]

And soon another Radeon card will follow...

http://hdrlab.org.nz/radeonhd-driver/

only for os4 as far as i get it.

[Zac67]

If only nVidia were as open to the developer community That said, I don't imagine any of the current CUDA capable cards are available in AGP form factors.

:lol: Just imagine CUDA running on Amiga - that would be WAY cool!

I wonder whether some day we'd get PCIe backplanes for classic Amigas...:banana:

[Karlos]

:lol: Just imagine CUDA running on Amiga - that would be WAY cool!

I would absolutely love that. The first thing I'd investigate is hardware planar to chunky conversion to allow OS support for old planar modes (with the bitplanes living in the card's memory) with a kernel to perform p2c conversion into a visible framebuffer. Adding support for things like HAM would hardly be taxing, either.

I wonder whether some day we'd get PCIe backplanes for classic Amigas...:banana:

Not very likely, unless someone wants to make a custom northbridge

[Zac67]

Not very likely, unless someone wants to make a custom northbridge

Definitely quite a bit of work not very probable to pay off. Do you think a simple PCI-PCIe bridge could work for a single slot? Usually they're used the other way round, but might it be possible to adapt a PCIe slot to a PCI bus that way?

[Karlos]

In theory, it's doable. If you can convert serial to parallel, the reverse is possible. I dunno how many PCIe gfx cards would work in a single lane though. Not many, I expect. You can get GPUs designed for PCIe with AGP bridging logic to work with older v3 AGP slots, but vanilla PCI is significantly further back still.

Attempting to covert multiple lanes on the card to parallel PCI I simply cannot see working, given the way PCIe does point to point.

[Hans_]

only for os4 as far as i get it.

Correct, the RadeonHD drivers are OS4 only. It's being developed using cards with built in PCI-to-PCIe bridges. I still hope that someone can make OS4 hardware with a proper PCIe bus though.

Hans