AmigaOS 4.x Graphics Survey 2018 – Rise of the Emulators

The results are in for this year’s AmigaOS graphics card survey and they’re quite interesting. For starters, 467 people contributed this year vs 348 in 2017. That’s a 34% jump. Maybe the community is growing…

What are people using as their main graphics card? There are two clear trends:

• People are slowly migrating toward newer cards. Use of the oldest cards declined a bit (e.g., CyberVision & Voodoo cards), while newer cards usage generally increased starting with the Radeon 7xxx series (which is still an old card)
• There’s been a huge jump in people using AmigaOS 4.x in emulators (from 13 to 108; an 8.3x time increase)

The emulation statistics may have been influenced by WinUAE/UAE becoming an official category this year, but the jump is so big that it’s likely a real trend. Plus, there’s an even large jump in emulation use in the additional cards results (from 4 to 88; a 22x increase):

Use of old cards remains stubbornly high. I guess people like to keep using their old hardware as much as possible. It’s also surprising how many people still use Radeon X1xxx to Radeon HD 6xxx series cards. They’re all PCI-Express cards just like the Radeon HD 7xxx and newer series, but 3D drivers are not available for them. Lack of 3D would be a dealbreaker for me.

Warp3D Nova Capable Cards

So, I was hoping to see a marked increase in Warp3D Nova card usage (hey, I wrote it, so I want more people to enjoy it). Well, that’s not exactly what I found. In fact, on initial glance it looks like it went backwards:

The graph above divides the results for people’s main graphics card into three categories, and shows their “market share.” As you can see, the Warp3D Nova card section of the pie shrank. That’s thanks to the large increase in emulation usage. If we look at only users of real physical hardware, then Warp3D Nova capable cards gained a few percentage points:

Conclusion & Further Questions

It’s clear that there’s a general but slow trend toward newer hardware. By far the biggest trend, though, is the dramatic rise in emulation, although the majority still use real hardware. Warp3D Nova capable card usage is increasing, albeit at a slow pace.

A few questions immediately come to mind:

1. Older hardware owners, what would convince you to upgrade to newer Warp3D Nova capable hardware?
2. Emulation users, what would get you to buy real hardware?
3. Anyone up for writing a Warp3D Nova driver for WinUAE/UAE?

Please tell me in the comments section below.

NOTE: The data was cleaned up a little. In particular, some “Other” responses were reassigned to the correct category (e.g., “Radeon M9” was reassigned to the Radeon 9xxx category where it belongs).