The german site dedicated to Linux on PPC systems PPCNUX has benchmarked the 3D drivers available for MorphOS using the three generations of the famous FPS Quake, in order to test the quality of indipendently developed drivers on a non-mainstream OS running on non-mainstream PPC hardware. You can find the english version of the article here.
3D Acceleration on MorphOS Tested
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Eugenia Loli
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ATI Radeon AIW 9000
ATI Radeon 9200
Voodoo 3500TV
What year are we in? These are old card and wont get you anywhere fast…
What you will get is 3D support on a non-mainstream OS.
Try that on a mainstream OS like DOS!!!
:B
Try that on a mainstream OS like DOS!!!
DOS did have 3d support via glide/3dfx cards
That is true, they are rather old. Still though, considering that factor, and also the fact of MorphOS not being a larger mainstream OS and henceforth lacking developers, drivers, and so on, I would have to say those older cards really hold some decent ground on MorphOS. More power to them I figure. It’s a step in the right direction, by far.
Considering what you said still, I wonder about newer cards. The article made it sound like it didn’t support many newer cards yet, but it didn’t really specify much at all. That would be nice to see new cards and/or some NVIDIA ones also for comparison sake.
Well, here’s a small capatibility excerpt from http://3d.morphos-team.net/
The listed 3dfx cards were tested in combination with Pegasos 1 and Pegasos 2 mainboards as well as PowerUP accelerator hardware.
Voodoo 3
Voodoo 4
Voodoo 5
The following cards can only be used with a bplan Pegasos 1 or Pegasos 2 mainboard.
Radeon 7000
Radeon 7200
Radeon 7500
The 3D functionality of the graphics cards below is only available to owners of Pegasos 2 mainboards.
Radeon 8500
Radeon 9000
Radeon 9100
Radeon 9200
Radeon 9250
Edited 2005-11-13 03:57
Well. MorphOS is sold for low-end hardware, so writing drivers for GeForce 7800’s is a waste of time… Since they’re using old cards they might as well use old games. When the Radeon 9000’s were hott stuff, QIII would have been just released or not yet released (IIRC).
I really don’t know why they tested QI though.. To show how it doesn’t scale to higher resolutions?
Here is the latest port: VirtualGrandPrix2
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2005/11/start-your-engines.html
Who needs mainstream? MorphOS runs on this:
http://www.mobilegt.com
Save DOS for elevators, conference centers and the 20th century!
Edited 2005-11-13 02:46
Performances are honest if you think the fact that the chipset on which Pegasos is built, originally did not allow use of AGP.
AGP on Pegasos is a divert from normal PCI, and so you must deal with many compromises.
The use of AGP cards is granted, but it permits only the use of the videocards which have 3,3 volts pin-layout. This is why only relatively old videocards are used.
There are new evaluation platforms already tested and MorphOS even run on it.
These new motherboards are ready and built upon Tundra TS108 Chipset which allows even on PPC-CPU based motherboards to achieve DDR2 memories, SATA and PCI-Express.
Then, if these card will hit the market, next time we will deal with 3D performance tests of Pegasi in action, it will show characteristics right based with up-to-date PCI-exp accelerated cards…
…so none could have again complaints that tests are made on obsolete video cards.
Well it’s not like Quake 4 is going to be written for MorphOS, so I really don’t understand the complaints
Well hey, you never know. Things could change pretty rapidly before anyone would even realize it. Who knows, maybe it’ll become a more popular system later on. And hey, maybe there are other games which will come along for it, as those links above show.
More importantly though, thanks for the insight. I wasn’t too sure about MorphOS and what exactly it was aiming to do.
This appears to be a classic operating system and very interesting to me. What hardware does it work on besides the one reviewed?
>to achieve DDR2 memories, SATA and PCI-Express.
People, please don’t confuse PCI-X and PCIe AGAIN!
Tundra Tsi108 currently only supports PCI-X (like the
Pegasos chipset in theory) which is not really useful
for gfx.
For SATA you can use any PCI card you have drivers for…