3D driver system: A-EON announced Warp 3D Nova and OpenGL ES 2.0

"Warp 3D" is a 3D driver system for AmigaOS which was developed by the Frieden brothers at the end of the nineties. Originally the archive was Freeware and in 2001 became a commercial product, distributed by Hyperion. Later it became part of AmigaOS 4. Unfortunately the drivers have not been developed further for years neither by the Friedens nor by Hyperion. Instead of, drivers for current graphic boards has been developed by Hans de Ruiter on behalf of A-EON. NOVA should be the name of the fifth version Warp 3D which was never released.



In 2014 A-EON purchased rights which allows the company to develop further Warp 3D. First results soon are expected: In a press release A-EON today has announced, that Hans de Ruiter is working on an improved version of Warp 3D, which is supposed to be sold as "Warp 3D Nova". The most important new feature is the support of shaders: A modern shader-based 2D/3D graphics API for AmigaOS 4

Supports vertex and fragment (pixel) shaders giving developers great freedom over lighting models, effects, vertex transformations, etc.

Hardware accelerated Transformation, Clipping & Lighting (TCL) is implicitly supported (programmed via shaders)

Uses the SPIR-V standard for shaders. A GLSL to SPIR-V compiler is included

All rendering is done via Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) which can be stored in VRAM for high performance.

Render state stored in Render State Objects (RSOs). Having no global state avoids state thrashing, and allows multi-threaded rendering. Note: While there's no global state, a default RSO is allocated for convenience

Includes an SDK with everything needed to start writing apps & games including examples ranging from querying hardware capabilities through to per-pixel lighting with normal mapping

Can co-exist with earlier versions Warp3D-SI & MiniGL Warp 3D Nova is supposed to support most of the "Radeon HD" graphic boards with "Southern Island"-chipset.



In order to complete the support of 3D, additionally Daniel 'Daytona675x' Müßener was hired to develop a OpenGL ES 2-wrapper, which is an emulation of the OpenGL ES specifications with the help of Warp 3D Nova.



There are no information regarding the price. In a quote from Hans de Ruiter in the press release he said "there is still work to add compiler enhancements and many more features".



Hint of the editorial stuff: For some time A-EON tries to develop further some part of the operating system or to replace some components of the OS by new and improved ones. Additional to 2D and 3D graphic drivers, Warp 3D Nova or Multiviewer NG, for months an archive named "Amiga Enhancer" is mentioned, which among others is supposd to include improved versions of the InstallerNG and of the Ringhio Notification Server and provides a text editor ("MultiEdit") as well as a dock called X-Dock. We do not know what Hyperion thinks of such activities. (cg) (Translation: dr)



[News message: 24. Mar. 2016, 01:56] [Comments: 0]

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