Originally posted by oiaohm
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Patches Proceed For Disabling Radeon AGP GART, Deprecating TTM AGP
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Originally posted by kylew77 View PostI was thinking more people who do like NES and SNES emulation and the computers from the 1980s like the Amiga and emulation like that. 21st century consoles aren't going to be emulated well on hardware from around 2000.Main MiSTer binary and Wiki. Contribute to MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer development by creating an account on GitHub.
Really when you are talking about running NES/SNES and other systems from 1980s as close to perfect today without the legacy hardware you are not normally talking PC. Instead like this MiSTer that the main board is 130USD and with all the add on boards it under 500 USD. Why is this so good is it a FPGA chip that can really reproduce very close approximation of the circuits those old systems had so zero performance jitter.
x86 cpus due to SMM and other things have a lot of jitter in performance. Even the Raspberry PI4 with cooling has quite a high jitter value but way lower than a x86 processor that would have a AGP slot. The last intel x86 cpu without major jitter issues is the 486dx4 100.
Those old 1980 consoles are fixed clock zero jitter so next to impossible to-do properly on a x86 PC of any time-frame. Raspbery PI 4 not ideal but gets closer.
Basically just because something is old does not mean it easy to emulate.
Originally posted by kylew77 View PostI also completely agree that a Raspberry PI 4 is going to be more powerful than a Pentium 4 while using less power
Playing old PC games that expect jitter the old PC systems do well. The idea that you can recycle a old x86 PC into a decent functional old console emulator is an idea people have but it really does not work as well as they expect. Lot of cases they think X rom they have got is broken somehow because X game from the console is unplayable and the issue really be the jitter problems. Yes it does show up at times that colours and other things you should see due to the colour being made by frame switching you don't see correctly any more and other game play effecting things.
I have had the stupid where a person had a rom they though was broken because game play logic appeared to screw up random-ally on there x86 system same emulator built for arm on a Raspberry PI3.
The jitter in performance difference caused by dynamic clocks and SMM and other things on x86 is more problem than many expect when you get into really old console emulation.
The zero performance jitter of those old 1980s consoles is really simple to forgot is a feature their game roms were designed to expect and its not exactly that simple to reproduce. Yes our modern x86 and arm cpu do speculative executions and other things and yes this has came at the price of predictable execution time frames so introducing a jitter factor that those old console just don't have and the programs for them are not built for this modern behavour.
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Originally posted by starshipeleven View PostI have my doubts that gaming on NetBSD is viable, besides those using proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
Also unless there are additional NetBSD-only opensource games, most is basic stuff and the only well-known ones are like Wesnoth and 0AD.
not a great idea. Depending on what console you are emulating, you are either wasting space and power (i.e. a raspberry Pi can do the same), or for newer consoles your processor sucks balls and can't run the emulator properly (that are usually CPU-intensive).
For example, Dolphin emulator needs 64bit system with OpenGL 3.0, and that's a tall order for an AGP card.
I also completely agree that a Raspberry PI 4 is going to be more powerful than a Pentium 4 while using less power, but that gets into CapEX vs OpEX costs. Some people, heck many people I know of, would rather spend more money on power monthly that move to a new system and invest in the new hardware. My mother ran a P4 system until the wheels feel off and I moved her to a Phenom II system with way more power.
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Originally posted by DeepDayze View Post
No not really, as that old machine I use mainly as a netbook.
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Originally posted by agd5f View PostI think, largely come from the fact that PCI GART (at least on the the oldest radeons), only had like one TLB entry so there were a lot more page table walks.
Originally posted by agd5f View PostBoth AGP GART and PCI GART are handled by architecture independent drivers.
You can think of the single TLB like the big kernel lock of old. In fact they are both kind of related.
Originally posted by agd5f View PostThe AGP bridge drivers for AGP GART and the GPU drivers for PCI(e) GART.
Yes the newer AGP cards based on pcie chipset with a AGP to pcie bridge chip also will use out the box more than 1 TLB entry on x86 because they are using the pcie gart code not the pci gart code.
If they fix up the TLB entry problem in the x86 build PCI GART to match what the powerpc build PCI GART does there really should not be any major performance drop. Of course this does not have to happen for the PCIe based AGP cards that have bridge chips and this is why some AGP cards will have a performance hit and others will be what the difference.
Originally posted by agd5f View PostIn fact, you can (and probably should) use both at the same time in order to support both cached and uncached system memory.
PS one of the reasons why powerpc PCI GART could use more than 1 TLB entry is no AGP GART so able to use areas in the GPU mmu that would have been used if AGP GART was enabled for generic PCI stuff. So you really cannot have PCI GART and AGP GART perform at absolute max at the same time. AGP GART to perform at max equals cripple(lock to 1TLB) /disable PCI GART. Reverse is true as well for PCI GART to be able to perform at max you need to disable AGP GART so it can have more than 1 TLB entry to play with.
Last edited by oiaohm; 17 May 2020, 06:47 PM.
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Originally posted by kylew77 View PostNetBSD supports Wine like FreeBSD and unlike OpenBSD as well as many open source games.
Also unless there are additional NetBSD-only opensource games, most is basic stuff and the only well-known ones are like Wesnoth and 0AD.
The only perk I can see of running a modern OS on a likely 32 bit system with AGP graphics is for newer emulators for console games or for the various open source games and having the latest versions of them.
For example, Dolphin emulator needs 64bit system with OpenGL 3.0, and that's a tall order for an AGP card.Last edited by starshipeleven; 17 May 2020, 04:05 PM.
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Originally posted by torsionbar28 View PostHow is it garbage?
It's comparable to a GMA3150, which is also complete garbage.
The only reason it was placed on AGP was because AGP has dedicated bandwith (while PCI bus is shared with all other cards), it would run fine on PCI bandwith too.
Unless you meant
That card RIGHT NOW is barely more than a 2D chip, it will not run heavy DEs like GNOME or KDE because it does not support OpenGL 2.0, go figure running any modern application that needs any form of 3D acceleration.
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Originally posted by starshipeleven View PostWhat for, it's not like you can actually run applications that use it in NetBSD anyway
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Originally posted by starshipeleven View PostI'm going on a limb and take a bind stab in the dark with the following statement:
That graphics chip is complete garbage
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