@imagodespira
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"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.