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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Vampire 1200 V4 Mediator Compatible?page  1 2 

Tim D

Posts 84
04 May 2018 22:11


I guess the mediator or at least voodoo becomes unnecessary if the Vampire core would also support 3D and someone would come up with a Warp3D driver...

One can dream, no :D


Markus B

Posts 209
05 May 2018 11:27


Markus B wrote:

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  No one said 60 Hz.
 
  FULLHD at 24/25/30 Hz are valid frequencies which the Vampire can drive.
 

 
  OK, not thought about those.
  So for 2160p24 it's roughly 200 MHz pixel clock rate?

So, what is the expected maximum pixel clock rate of the Vampire V4?



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
05 May 2018 12:28


Markus B wrote:

  So, what is the expected maximum pixel clock rate of the Vampire V4?

The SAGA chipset is designed to support resolution up to 4K.
The maximum pixel clock of the V4 should be around 85 MHz.

This means if you find monitors/TVs which sync to 4K resolution@10Hz then you could use this.


Markus B

Posts 209
05 May 2018 12:36


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  The SAGA chipset is designed to support resolution up to 4K.
  The maximum pixel clock of the V4 should be around 85 MHz.
 
  This means if you find monitors/TVs which sync to 4K resolution@10Hz then you could use this.

Thanks for the information.
The maximum clock rate which can be generated depends on the FPGA, right?
Is a design possible, where the signal is created by an additional chip which achieves higher clock rates?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
05 May 2018 13:18


Markus B wrote:

  Is a design possible, ... which achieves higher clock rates?

Yes this is possible.

Saying this, the current range of Pixelclock is absolutely reasonable for a retro Amiga design.



Wawa T

Posts 695
05 May 2018 20:13


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  If as Wawa said that the Bus of the Mediator reaches 7 MB/sec
  then you get not even one 1 FPS update speed to the GFX card.
 

  that, assuming the voodoo card act as simple frame buffer and every whole frame needs to be sent via the bus. luckily it looks like p96 knows it better (as it is supposed to be) and has some strategy of only refreshing areas that actually change. therefore the high res workbench still feels responsive. i trust apollo p96 driver takes the advantage of the same functionalities, and given the hardware magnitudes better throughput, it should even deliver magnitudes better results.
 
  especially mediator/voodoo will epic fail as soon as the whole screen needs to be refreshed at a higher resolution, like in case of full motion video or a 3d game. (without gl)


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
06 May 2018 13:07


wawa t wrote:

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

    If as Wawa said that the Bus of the Mediator reaches 7 MB/sec
    then you get not even one 1 FPS update speed to the GFX card.
 

  that, assuming the voodoo card act as simple frame buffer and every whole frame needs to be sent via the bus. luckily it looks like p96 knows it better (as it is supposed to be) and has some strategy of only refreshing areas that actually change. therefore the high res workbench still feels responsive. i trust apollo p96 driver takes the advantage of the same functionalities, and given the hardware magnitudes better throughput, it should even deliver magnitudes better results.
 
  especially mediator/voodoo will epic fail as soon as the whole screen needs to be refreshed at a higher resolution, like in case of full motion video or a 3d game. (without gl)

The voodoo 3 card connected in a mediator, will refresh the whole screen at a pretty dtable frame rate.
What I’ve done many times is to play games on my tv card while the workbench screen resolution was above 1280x1024


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
06 May 2018 13:15


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Mallagan Bellator wrote:

  I have a mediator 1200 SX and voodoo 3 card, I run 1920x1080 at 60 Hz on it, no problem
 

 
  The main problem /bottleneck is not the GFX card but the mediator bus.
 
  A truecolor 32bit image in 1920x1080 is 8 MB of size
  If as Wawa said that the Bus of the Mediator reaches 7 MB/sec
  then you get not even one 1 FPS update speed to the GFX card.
 
  7 MB/sec Mediator Bus speed would be very slow
  if you compare this to the speed of the Vampire memory.
  On the Vampire we talk about 600 MB/sec
 

Ok, so the voodoo 3 card has 16 megabytes of graphics ram on it. I can run 1920x1080 at 16 bit color depth as max, and I’m not sure if that’s because of the design of the 3dfx chip or because lack of memory. I believe if you were to change all the pixles at once, it could be slow


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
06 May 2018 13:20



Read this, it’s copied directly from the Elbox product page for the mediator

Mediator PCI 1200 TX

  Enjoy PCI in your Amiga
Mediator is a PCI implementation for connecting PCI devices in Amiga computers, allowing expansion of Amiga with all kinds of industry standard hardware products like graphic, sound, network, USB, TV tuner, ISDN and MPEG-2 hardware decoder PCI cards.

Moreover, the Mediator PCI busboard is ready for SharkPPC PCI cards based on the latest PowerPC G3 and G4 processors.

Hardware Requirements
The minimum hardware configuration is: Amiga 1200 in tower case with a 4MB RAM expansion card.

The recommended configuration is: Amiga 1200 in the E/BOX tower case, any 68060 (or PPC with 68060) turbo card with 64MB RAM, a SharkPPC G3/G4 card with 256MB SDRAM, a Voodoo4 graphic card.

Features
Mediator PCI 1200 TX features:
• 6 PCI slots (PCI 2.2 compatible)
For simultaneous use of up to six PCI cards fully assimilated in the Amiga environment.
• 66/33MHz PCI clock
With the PCI clock running at 33MHz, data transfers are executed with the bandwidth of up to 132MB/s and up to 264MB/s for 66MHz clocking.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
06 May 2018 13:43


Mallagan,
   
Please not mislead users by posting unrealistic marketing numbers!
   
It is well known that Elbox "theoretic" / "up to" bandwidth numbers are by far not reached in the AMIGA.
In reality Amiga to PCI performance is a MAGNITUDE lower than those peak numbers that you posted.
 
Please run some real benchmark and post real numbers to inform people!


Exin Tyim

Posts 2
11 May 2018 14:52


-Warning PPC-Rant ahead!-

Why not? Because the G3 is SLOW. I know all you amiga guys love the PPC's performance. Sure, vs. an 040 its alright, but I've been a mac user since the Mac II, used and had way more Accellerator cards in Macs than many of you probably ever have seen. I still have a huge box full of Turboboards ranging from 040 cards to G3/G4 cards. I even have a Phase5 G3 card. (defunct as anything Phase5 related nowadays...)

Powermacs had a very fast bus system. (40-80Mhz, 64Bit)

Yet, for example, difference in a Powermac so-and-so, ~100Mhz 601 +Cache vs. Any G3 is not so big. Only in a few Games, there was a subtle "hint". (Had all kinds of Voodoo's in Mac's)

All in all, G3's don't live long, are not that fast(No matter the animal you glue a PII on, the PII kicked the G3 into the orbit.)

Stick with the Vamp.

And to the devs: If you ever have an FPGA big enough to put the rasterization engine of a Voodoo 1, that would blast any PPC into the orbit next to the G3. Raw Mhz is not everything. Btw. The Voodoo1 runs at 50Mhz. :)


Rob M

Posts 60
02 Jun 2018 14:57


I can't see many people wanting to get a Mediator after the purchase a V4 but there will bonuses for those who already have the a Mediator already.

You will get Warp3D/MiniGL from the outset, while we don't know how long it will take to support 3D functions on the V4 and whether it will be compatible with existing software.

You'll be able to have multiple displays which may be useful for some users.  I think most can think of use case for this cases such as have an app on one screen and documentation on another.

You'll be able to have multiple audio cards so you can record or mix the output of one card with another.

A TV card also be useful for more than receiving TV broadcast which have mostly switched to digital now.  You can use your Amiga to display the output the display from other computers and consoles as well as VCR and DVD players.
If you are lucky enough to have a copy of VHI studio you can use it as a capture.  While the bus between the Amiga and Mediator will limit video capture abilities it should be fine for taking stills and you don't necessarily need to capture video in real time.

It's worth bearing in mind that even if the V4 outperforms the Mediator in various aspects there should be no actual drawback to having both pieces of hardware in your system.  The same should go for a PCI PPC card too.


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