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lcuk's Avatar
Posts: 1,635 | Thanked: 1,816 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Manchester, England
#11
TA,
the outputs you are discussing are physically not wired up to anything so cannot be used on consumer devices.

We need to work with what we have and make use of any tricks at our disposal.

The powervr would certainly appear to support a destination memory framebuffer and the current hardware can (just about) transfer an 800*480 YUV framebuffer at 25fps, if we can fill the correct memory area using any additional hardware we have (powervr/dsp/iva) then it takes the pressure off the cpu leaving it plenty of time for other goodness.

I am just frustrated by lack of a (binary) driver to make use of hardware plainly and simply in use on other n series devices.
 

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#12
I think it's probably a matter of priorities. I doubt you can find a person here that doesn't have some feature enhancements they would like to see implemented in the base, proprietary, software. While having the drivers would be a neat hack I don't know how much it would really enhance the NIT experience.

With nokia ( I hope ) working furiously on the NIT update that will have an OMAP3 series SoC with some real hardware for 3d and decoding I don't see where the driver would add a lot of value
 
lcuk's Avatar
Posts: 1,635 | Thanked: 1,816 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Manchester, England
#13
Originally Posted by brontide View Post
With nokia ( I hope ) working furiously on the NIT update that will have an OMAP3 series SoC with some real hardware for 3d and decoding I don't see where the driver would add a lot of value
That is the future.

We have the hardware omap2 with 3d rendering capabilities NOW.
The same hardware is in use NOW on other n-series devices.


Sure, the future might bring new improved things, but I am interested in not having my device obsoleted just because there is higher specification stuff around.

The nokia tablets are amazing and I just want to use the hardware to its fullest potential.

Imagine how fast things would run on new hardware if it was tailored and designed to run in a more constrained environment...

Just praying for new hardware and throwing bloat at it semms useless to me: a similar situation currently occurs in desktops - most home computers now run effectively slower than my amiga used to.

Last edited by lcuk; 2008-07-08 at 12:54. Reason: missed a not
 

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#14
Having even some ugly-hack driver now would have the future benefit of being able to develop and test 3D applications/games now and have them (more or less) ready for a future device that might come with official 3D acceleration.

I wouldn't personally mind if there would not be a 3D accelerator at all in my device, but having it there but not being able to use it because of (apparently) just a missing driver is frustrating . Especially if there already is a driver developed by TI or Nokia but they dont want to release it for whatever reason (licensing?).
 

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#15
Originally Posted by lcuk View Post
The nokia tablets are amazing and I just want to use the hardware to its fullest potential.
I don't disagree that the hardware is underutilized, just that with constrained resources Nokia is probably focusing on things that are higher priority. It's the same story with the DSP or the communications co-processor.
 
lcuk's Avatar
Posts: 1,635 | Thanked: 1,816 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Manchester, England
#16
Originally Posted by brontide View Post
It's the same story with the DSP or the communications co-processor.
Brontide, I dont know what communications co-pro you are on about, but I know the DSP is getting a workout in numerous codecs and lardman and others are actively developing for it.
The DSP is supported hardware with drivers and additional SDKs, its available and being used.

I find it very difficult to believe that Nokia can license the drivers for a chip in one context but not be able to get the same licensing for another, and if released as a binary blob would allow us to *see* what it can do rather than spending time pontificating that we can't.

I bought this device because I believed the hardware was capable enough. I am doing everything I can to make it work to *my* standards and hope at some point in the future I can get some additional help from the rest of the hardware.
 

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Benson's Avatar
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#17
Latest word from Nokia on this (it was mentioned at LinuxTag, I think) is that the Linux powervr drivers from TI are low-performance and crash-happy, and (IIUC) would still cost them money to license. That money would be (I assume) to the tune of per N8x0 ever sold, even though they couldn't (reasonably) release it as production software, but a developers' special.

With a little research, you can probably find out some names who have actually played with it (indt, I think, did some work with it) and ask them questions regarding what it can and can't do; not the same as playing with it yourself, I know, but that's a possibility.

(It's even conceivable that you could get a "loaned" binary driver, but I doubt that, unless you already know the right guy.)
 
Posts: 170 | Thanked: 75 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ NYC
#18
This is similar to the HTC situation. It's funny how different groups react to the same situation.

N8x0 get's a thread. HTC users go for a website begging for HTC to do something.
 
Posts: 2,102 | Thanked: 1,309 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#19
We've already begged - the PowerVR bugtracker entry has been there for a long while and I and others asked this question on the maemo-developers list when the N800 come out.
 
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#20
Originally Posted by lardman View Post
Some of us started looking at the driver (there's an old 2.6.10 (iirc) driver for the PowerVR in the OMAP2430 floating around), but I at least have been busy doing other things.
Any hope of you prioritizing this a bit in the future, you know, taking a Sunday to poke around in the code and see what you can do?

Originally Posted by Benson View Post
With a little research, you can probably find out some names who have actually played with it (indt, I think, did some work with it) and ask them questions regarding what it can and can't do; not the same as playing with it yourself, I know, but that's a possibility.

(It's even conceivable that you could get a "loaned" binary driver, but I doubt that, unless you already know the right guy.)
Don't suppose you could do some research in that direction, Benson? Maybe get some specific names? Then give that info to lardman?

I would love to see this move forward a bit. It drives me crazy to see 10fps on software OpenGL rendering, knowing that we have a 3D accelerator just gathering silicon dust.
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