"Alas, the Southern Island's video decoder hardware is noticeably slower than the newer Polaris cards (Radeon RX). Their spec sheets say that it should be able to handle HD video, but it seems that it only just can; at least, with H.264 videos."
On a slow test system with an old AMD Athlon and Radeon 7750, 60fps playback is no problem and the decoder runs not yet in full usage.
Nice that it's theoretically possible. What I wrote is based on observation of behaviour on AmigaOS. Both VA drivers are using AMD's driver code. The Polaris cards work great; Southern Islands cards work, but the video decoder is noticeably slower. And I mean A LOT slower. I do wonder if video players need to be pipelined differently so that the CPU can do more productive work while the VPU is decoding.** That's beyond the scope of my work, though.
Quote:
Frank is currently testing some games and stuff to get an idea how fast our cards could be and what we can expect from our games. There is a huge gap and maybe we can not bring newer games like "Pyramid Quest" to AmigaOs. (Spencer 300fps to 80fs on a year 2009 AMD + HD7750, cards are fast enough for our stuff...)
Well, AMD have multiple well-paid teams responsible for writing and optimizing their drivers. They also get to talk directly to the hardware engineers, and have specialized profiling and debugging tools that I don't have access to.
We basically have one guy (me) writing the 2D & 3D drivers, as well as building out the entire graphics system (and then having to work on stuff like DvPlayer too). I've spent months trying to boost performance, and every improvement has been hard won. We also have the disadvantage that the GPUs are little-endian, and our CPUs & OS are big-endian. The endianness conversion is an added overhead that other systems don't have.
Sorry that it's still not fast enough. There's plenty that could still be done, but right now it's only me working on it all. I still hope that one brave developer will dare to give graphics driver development for AmigaOS a shot one day...
Hans
** I suspect that many CPU cycles are being wasted waiting for the VPU to finish decoding. That's CPU time that could have been used for audio decoding, or something else.
@Spectre660: You can download MaceTD2 for free, paying is optional. So you can try it if you want.
@Hans: Thanks for your comment! My post was not to criticize your work. We are happy with it. But i think sometimes it is good to discuss some backgrounds within the community. To give us all some insights and also shows the problems, our limits and the amount of work the devs have to do.
One more thing: use OpenGL ES 2 directly when possible instead of GL4ES. GL4ES seems to have a bottleneck. It may be an interaction between GL4ES and our 3D graphics system. I suspect it might be flushing the pipeline too often, which hurts the number of draw ops/s. However, right now that's just a theory.
Edited by Spectre660 on 2022/8/18 20:05:11 Edited by Spectre660 on 2022/8/18 20:06:48 Edited by Spectre660 on 2022/8/18 20:09:41 Edited by Spectre660 on 2022/8/18 22:30:42
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card
I've just tested the demo versions of Spencer and MACE, both of which worked fine. (Very nice looking games btw) I'm using a Sam460 and Yeston RX560 with RX 2.11 driver. So possibly the cause of freezing elswhere is narrower than just Sam460 and RX cards. Could be specific to RX550? Just a guess.
2K and 5k are for Radeon Rx. Your 720p and 1080p playback results are more or less what I observed when testing with a Radeon HD. Was with a Sam460ex so I was hopping that the faster machines would be able to squeeze the extra performance to allow 1080p to work.
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card
720p - Smooth sound and in sync audio (6% CPU) 1080p - Smooth sound and in sync audio (5% CPU) 2k - Smooth sound and in sync audio (6% CPU) 4k - Smooth sound and in sync audio (6% CPU)
Spencer, MaceTD, Doom3, Reborn to Castle Wolfenstein, Heretic II, all good so far. Couple of WB locks ups, not reproducible. Not sure yet if coincidental or linked to RX.
Edited by ddni on 2022/8/19 16:21:36 Edited by ddni on 2022/8/19 20:39:42