When is an FPU chip really needed????

[barney]

Hello, I have an Amiga 1200 with an accelerator board.   Do I necessarily need the FPU chip installed?  How often and why is it really needed?  Will I see a difference in every days gaming?  Just wondering whether this was a necessary upgrade or not.

Thanks.

Barney

[TheGoose]

Not in most gaming. Most games do not make use of FPUs. Some later 3D games will - Doom, Quake, etc.

[Karlos]

Unless you want to do floating point arithmetic, you can live happily without it. Very few amiga games ever used an FPU. Those that did were usually 3D and used it for polygon calculations. The amiga version(s) of Quake is just about the only example I can think of that requires an FPU to work at all. And frankly, to play that, the FPU needs to be inside a fast 68060

So in short, no, you really don't need it.

-edit-

@TheGoose

As far as I can recall, Doom used fixed point arithmetic.

[klx300r]

heavily used in 3d rendering programs like lightwave & others

[NovaCoder]

this will give your FPU a good workout

[barney]

Thanks for the info everybody.  I guess I really don't need one after all.

Barney

[ChaosLord]

99% of Amiga games never use FPU at all.

Total Chaos AGA uses an FPU if you have one, but only once, the very first time you run the game, to decompress all the audio into Amiga format.  If you have an 060 FPU this takes 6 minutes.  If you have no FPU it takes 1-3 hours.

[rkauer]

IIRC, TFX (war planes simulation) uses the FPU, too.

 Anyway, even with with a 68882 @50MHz the game was dog-slow.

[NovaCoder]

There a few different versions of TFX floating around with various patches applied.  If by some miracle you happen upon the right combination you might get some decent speed out of it............if you have an 060 that is

[BozzerBigD]

@NovaCoder

Which version of TFX do you recommend for the 060?

[TCMSLP]

I'm often finding software that either needs (or benefits from) FPU.  I remember having to download specific non-FPU versions of AmigaAMP (or was it AmiAmp?), video players, some compression utilities etc - all day to day stuff really.  

As far as games go - as others have already said, the later 3D games will likely need (or massively benefit) from an FPU;  I'm thinking Alien Breed 3D, the later Doom ports etc.   It won't make any difference to the vast majority of games though

[BozzerBigD]

@TCMSLP

Because of the way that Doom and Alien Breed 3D use a kind of 2.5D tech rather than full polygon 3D, a FPU isn't necessary. Quake is the first FPS that required a FPU and also Tales from Heaven a full 3D platformer probably requires a FPU (and a 060 where it's built in).

[Rob]

@NovaCoder

Which version of TFX do you recommend for the 060?

Charlie Wallace released updated binaries for TFX so it would be best to try those out.  If the 040 version still doesn't run on your 060 setup try and track down Oxypatcher to speed up the 030 FPU version.

http://hol.abime.net/1367

[BozzerBigD]

@Rob

Thanks! ;-)

[kolla]

A search on Aminet for packages that contain files with name that either contain 68881, 68882 or FPU gives you a hint about the ammount of software that benefit from FPU, if not require it.

I am actually surprised by the number of games showing up...

http://aminet.net/search?content=68882&content=68881&content=fpu

In addition there is a lot of software buildt for 040 and 060 where FPU is not mentioned explicitly, but is taken for granted. Also in addition is software using math libraries that are optimized for FPU. And of course commercial software that is not on Aminet.