Warp3D was a project, founded by

Haage & Partner Haage & Partner is a German company established in 1995. The company distributes software products where they usually are the exclusive distributor. Products are aimed at Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, and has been aimed at AmigaOS in the past. T ...

in 1998, that aimed to provide a standard API which would enable programmers to access, and therefore use, 3D hardware on the Amiga. Its design was similar to that of both the Picasso96

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

drivers and operated in a similar fashion to the

3dfx 3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the l ...

Glide API Glide is a 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their ''Voodoo Graphics'' 3D accelerator cards. Although it originally started as a proprietary API, it was later open sourced by 3dfx. It was dedicated to rendering performance, supp ...

, which provided a uniform and standardised way for programmers to create software for the 3D graphics cards that were available at the time. It was hoped that the creation of this

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

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. Hyperion Entertainment developers created

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

subset called MiniGL sitting on top of Warp3D to ease porting of games such as

Heretic II ''Heretic II'' is a dark fantasy action-adventure game developed by Raven Software and published by Activision in 1998 continuing the story of Corvus, the main character from its predecessor, '' Heretic''. It is the fourth game in the '' Hexen: ...

. At time of its release, Warp3D provided significant speed increase over software rendering. Years later however, newer 3D APIs (e.g. TinyGL in MorphOS) offered better performance on the same hardware. In 2014, it was announced that Warp3D was now jointly owned by British company A-EON Technology Ltd. On April 1, 2015, A-EON Technology subsequently released Warp3D for RadeonHD (Southern Islands chipset). In March 2016, A-EON Technology Ltd announced that they had developed the new Warp3D Nova featuring support for

Shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the Rendering (computer graphics), rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved ...

. Warp3D Nova was originally mentioned as planned complete rewrite and Shader-centric design in the AmigaOS 4.0 Feature List more than decade earlier. Development of the new release intentionally took some inspiration from this original Warp3D Nova plan. The pre-release version 1.15 was published on 1 May 2016 in the Enhancer Software package for

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partner. "T ...

. 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 OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accel ...

2 implementation on top of Warp3D Nova. The first public version 1.4 was released on 31 August 2016 as part of the Enhancer Software package version 1.1.

Running Requirements

Warp3D requires the following in order to work properly * An

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

compatible system with

CyberGraphX CyberGraphX (pronounced "cybergraphics"), is the standard ReTargetable Graphics Application programming interface, API available for the Amiga and compatible systems. It was developed by Thomas Sontowski and Frank Mariak and later adopted by Phase ...

or Picasso96, containing: ** At least a

68040 The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola nami ...

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

with FPU for AmigaOS versions predating 4.0 ** A PowerPC CPU for AmigaOS 4.0+ ** Optionally

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

supported on

WarpOS WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed by ...

** Any of these graphics cards: *** CyberVision 3D *** CyberVision PPC *** BlizzardVision PPC *** Any

3Dfx 3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the l ...

Voodoo card *** ATI Radeon R100, R200 *** ATI RadeonHD

Southern Islands The Southern Islands is a planning area consisting of a collection of islets located within the Central Region of Singapore, once home to the native Malay islanders and sea nomads before they were relocated to the mainland for urban redevelopm ...

graphics cards It also requires 3D hardware to be present, and will not run with graphics cards that are 2D only, or

AGA Aga or AGA may refer to: Business * Architectural Glass and Aluminum (AGA), a glazing contractor, established in 1970 * AGA (automobile), ''Autogen Gasaccumulator AG'', 1920s German car company *AGA AB, ''Aktiebolaget Svenska Gasaccumulator'', a ...

, ECS or OCS.

Other implementations

Alain Thellier created open source clone called ''Wazp3D''.

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed Proprietary software, proprietary and Open-source software, open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amig ...

includes a Warp3D implementation known as ''Goa3D Graphics Library'' developed by Nicolas Sallin.

Running Requirements

Other implementations

References

Further reading