Warp3D

Warp3D was a project originally run 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.

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.

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. Hyperion Entertainment developers created OpenGL subset called MiniGL sitting on top of Warp3D to ease porting of games such as Heretic II.

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 is 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. 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.