@Hans

Thanks for the info.

One more question... can you shed any light on the future plans for Warp 3D? I know there were plans for Radeon HD drivers - are they still coming? Are there plans to update Warp 3D/MiniGL with more features?

@rwo

I can only imagine the pain involved with refactoring all of that code. It is one of those necessary evils of an evolving system architecture.

Congratulations on this major update to the graphics subsystem. It will certainly pay dividends many times over in the future.

@Hans

Wow amazing news on the Radeon driver! I can see a lot of work has gone into both the new composite video support and the new graphics card support. The X1000 DMA support is very nice to see and was likely quite challenging to get working.

The difference on the VO for mplayer is huge.

For video playback now that most other bottlenecks have been addressed, the last challenge is the decode. Any future plans for leveraging the on-board decode capability of the HD cards?

Congratulations again - these recent changes are a huge leap forward.

Would a RECENT: device make more sense? It's the first idea that popped into my head.

That would remove the need for flipping between tabs.

@Spirantho

Have you tried contacting Conexant directly?

@tlosm @BSzili

I was just making sure you were aware of the limitations of working with Radeon HD cards on the PegII machine.

Sounds like you understand that just fine.

Looking forward to what you get up to.

@ssolie

Are there any recorded versions of your session available online?

I see you were there in shorts again...

You definitely have you hands full on OS4!

@trixie

Nice article.

At work I'm busy converting approximately 800 "legacy" screens to GUI and I'm constantly bashing my junior devs over basic UI principles.

Some people "get it" and some just never will.

Having these standards in writing and with lots of examples helps a lot. Some people are very visual learners so the more visible examples the better.

It sounds like you will be updating the UISG wiki? I have a printed copy of the Amiga UI style guide here. Is this a rare item?

FYI my most recent UI-related books are Tuft's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and "Information Dashboard Design - The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Steven Few. Can you tell I'm doing some BI work? I like Few's book.

Cheers!

@kas1e

Nice work on getting the ball rolling on a machine!

My only concern is that the PegII machine doesn't work with PCI-based Radeon HD cards. There is a known issue with the PegII firmware that doesn't correctly intialize the internal bridge to the PCI-Express interface on the chips.

This may be an issue going forward when testing for compatibility with other setups using HD cards and for possibly supporting higher-spec games that would choke on a 92xx series card.

Would a Sam460 be a better base machine? I believe this would support both the 92xx series cards and the newer HD cards.

The Phoronix web site (Linux-centric) has an article covering off this issue of Mantle on Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ3MDU

Any hope of Mantle ever making it to OS4 relies on the Linux open source availability.

I have varying counts of issues 23, 24, 25 and 26 on hand from my days of doing the Canadian/USA distribution.

Anybody wanting copies let me know I can mail them out for $5 each including postage in Canada/USA.

Lyle -

Thanks for all the wonderful work you are doing with audio on OS4.

Cheers!

Quote:

If your code delivery is anything like mine we only document the major changes. Otherwise our users find too may red herrings reading our release notes. We learned to only document the big changes.

Sometimes less IS more.

Wow that was unexpected!

Nice work!!

Wow - nice work to all involved! Smooth parallax scrolling on a graphics card. No chipset magic required. Now replaced with compositing magic. :)

It would be interesting to see how this compares to a Sam460 in the following ways:
- same card in a PCI slot with the PCI->PCIe adaptor
- same card in the PCIe slot

I would suggest reviewing the wikipedia page on ATI gpus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ati_gpu# ... ands_.28HD_6xxx.29_series

The 6870 is a much faster card, but with the extra power requirements to go with it.

@thread

I like the idea that this discussion is happening AT ALL.

Thanks to the new hardware platforms from both ACube and A-EON we are one step closer to a growing ecosystem.

With the 3D work, both short term (Warp) and long term (Gallium) there is lots of good stuff to look forward to.

When it comes to deciding on what platforms (gfx cards) to support, sometimes the extra time/cost to support older platforms just isn't worth it. It may actually be cheaper to "bribe" users to upgrade from older hardware. I have been in similar situations and sometimes the bribe/carrot works. Sometimes the offer is trade-in values, sometimes it is discounts or free maintenance. Depends on the situation.

Once again - great thread and here's to 3D support in all its flavours!

@trixie

Nice work keeping the wiki up to date. The wiki page on application library is really well done. If the whole wiki keeps to this level of greatness it will be an amazing resource.

It seems like the planets are aligning for 3D support on OS4.

We have some great game engines coming up to speed, both natively developed and open source ports becoming possible.

Hans' great work on the Radeon drivers has brought them to the stage of being ready for use in the new Gallium3D implementation.

No pressure at all on the OS4 developers...

Amiwest could be very interesting this year. Bring it on!!

@number6...

The PayPal button is there but the link isn't properly set up. I just get the PayPal home page.

Donation money ready and waiting...