UserDoc:Warp3D

Warp3D User Guide

Overview

Warp3D is an Application Programming Interface (API) and driver system that allows software to utilise hardware accelerated 3D on supported graphics cards. Through Warp3D, applications can offload the drawing of polygon based graphics to the graphics card without having to know the specific details of the hardware in use.

Background

Warp3D was conceived as a lightweight driver and originally developed for 68K based machines running AmigaOS 3, with support for PowerPC applications via WarpOS. At that time, only a limited number of cards were available for the Amiga that offered any form of 3D support. These early devices had numerous limitations and this was reflected in the design and implementation of Warp3D. A key limitation of the originally supported hardware that has in turn shaped the evolution of Warp3D is that it accelerated the drawing stages only. Likewise, Warp3D abstracted only these drawing stages and it was the responsibility of the software to perform any necessary 3D calculations. Drawing, or to use the more technical term, rasterization, is typically the last step in a 3D graphics system. As a consequence, Warp3D is not an alternative or replacement for OpenGL.

Current version

Version 5 as shipped with AmigaOS 4 adds several new features but remains a rasterizer and for this reason is considered a legacy system. Presently supported cards such as the Radeon7000 and higher are able to accelerate more than just drawing and as such are underutilized by Warp3D. Warp3D will some stage be deprecated in favour of a more complete OpenGL implementation.

Components

Warp3D is split into three parts.

• LIBS:Warp3D.library

The main library as used by application software.

• LIBS:Warp3D/GFXDrivers/

This directory contains drivers that abstract the allocation of resources on the graphics card. Historically, access to these resources was controlled by whichever Retargetable Graphics (RTG) system was in use and so this contained drivers for both the CyberGraphX and Picasso96 RTG systems. Since AmigaOS 4, only Picasso96 is supported.

• LIBS:Warp3D/HWDrivers/

This directory contains drivers for specific 3D chips.