Quake II

While doing my weekly round on the Amiga forums, the following thread on the English Amiga Board caught my eye:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=74679&highlight=quake2

It's about optimizing and playing with the open source part of the Quake 2 engine.  Somewhere halfway in the thread (and still in 2014, I think) there are WarpOS compiled binaries which begged to be tested on the Sonnet.

Of course, as far as I understand the comments made in the thread, the code is far from optimized. And that it wouldn't be as fast as with Warp3D (around 26 FPS at 640x480 on a 233 MHz 604e - with Voodoo3 - see http://www.alinea-computer.de/amigaspeed/q***e2.html)

Here is a video with the Sonnet running Quake 2 on a Radeon without Warp3D:

As it can be briefly seen, a speed of 14 FPS is reached with 640x480 using the software renderer. Which is about 4 times slower per MHz as the 604e with Warp3D. So I guess the next step is to get Warp3D going for the Sonnet. That way other games like WipeOut will become available for the Sonnet too (and along with a nice speed increase on some other games).

As a side note. You can see that the A3000UX is sporting 400+ MB of memory. This is actually 64 FAST ram, around 200MB Video RAM and 128MB Sonnet RAM. The latter two being available to the PPC at (almost) full speed. This is about as much as we can cram reliable in the 512MB Zorro-III window of the mediator without further MMU tricks. With a Voodoo this would be 16MB Video RAM (max) and 256MB Sonnet RAM (max) as the start of the Sonnet memory must be on a boundary of a power of 2 so either 512MB which cannot be done with the current code (it clashes with the video ram) or 256MB.

Until next time.