Warp3D was a project, founded by Haage & Partner in 1998, that aimed to provide a standard API which would enable programmers to access, and therefore use, 3D hardware on the Amiga.^[1][2]

Its design was similar to that of both the Picasso96 graphics card drivers and operated in a similar fashion to the 3dfx Glide API, which provided a uniform and standardised way for programmers to create software for the 3D graphics cards that were available at the time.^[1]

It was hoped that the creation of this API would not only encourage the development and release of more 3D graphics cards, but also move away from the situation where a new piece of hardware had been developed with no software available to run on it. If the particular piece of software used the Warp3D API (enabled through a shared library), any current or newly developed hardware would be able to be used.^[1][3] Hyperion Entertainment developers created OpenGL subset called MiniGL sitting on top of Warp3D to ease porting of games such as Heretic II.^[4]

At time of its release, Warp3D provided significant speed increase over software rendering.^[5] Years later however, newer 3D APIs (e.g. TinyGL in MorphOS) offered better performance on the same hardware.^[6]

In 2014, it was announced that Warp3D was now jointly owned by British company A-EON Technology Ltd.^[7] On April 1, 2015, A-EON Technology subsequently released Warp3D for RadeonHD (Southern Islands chipset).^[8]

In March 2016, A-EON Technology Ltd announced that they had developed the new Warp3D Nova featuring support for Shaders.^[9][10] Warp3D Nova was originally mentioned as planned complete rewrite and Shader-centric design in the AmigaOS 4.0 Feature List more than decade earlier.^[11][12] Development of the new release intentionally took some inspiration from this original Warp3D Nova plan.^[13] The pre-release version 1.15 was published on 1 May 2016 in the Enhancer Software package for AmigaOS 4.^[14][15] Apart from its name and being related to 3D graphics, Warp3D Nova has nothing in common with the original Warp3D.

Also in March 2016 A-EON Technology Ltd announced that Daniel Müßener / GoldenCode.eu had been hired to create an OpenGL ES 2 implementation on top of Warp3D Nova.^[9] The first public version 1.4 was released on 31 August 2016 as part of the Enhancer Software package version 1.1.^[16]

Running Requirements

Warp3D requires the following in order to work properly

• An AmigaOS compatible system with CyberGraphX or Picasso96, containing:
  • At least a 68040 processor with FPU for AmigaOS versions predating 4.0
  • A PowerPC CPU for AmigaOS 4.0+
  • Optionally PowerPC supported on WarpOS^[1]
  • Any of these graphics cards:
    • CyberVision 3D
    • CyberVision PPC
    • BlizzardVision PPC^[17]
    • Any 3Dfx Voodoo card
    • ATI Radeon R100, R200
    • ATI RadeonHD Southern Islands graphics cards

It also requires 3D hardware to be present, and will not run with graphics cards that are 2D only, or AGA, ECS or OCS.^[18]

Other implementations

Alain Thellier created open source clone called Wazp3D.^[19] MorphOS included a Warp3D implementation known as Goa3D Graphics Library developed by Nicolas Sallin.^[20]

References

Further reading

• "Active Gamer - Warp3D 4.2 for Voodoo3". Amiga Active. No. 24. Pinprint Publishing. September 2001. pp. 50–. ISSN 1467-3533.
• "Warp Factor 3D!". Amiga Active. No. 25. Pinprint Publishing. October 2001. pp. 46–. ISSN 1467-3533.
• "Warp3D Masterclass". Amiga Active. No. 26. Pinprint Publishing. November 2001. pp. 48–. ISSN 1467-3533.