Chance Of Running Penumbra?

[second exodous]

So with the source how well do people on here think it will run? Loved these games, but they look a little too complex for the Pandora. I'm more excited about Gish on the Pandora than I am Penumbra since I don't see it happening.

 

[quadomatic]

So with the source how well do people on here think it will run? Loved these games, but they look a little too complex for the Pandora. I'm more excited about Gish on the Pandora than I am Penumbra since I don't see it happening.

Only time will tell

 

[Dead1nside]

It just takes somebody motivated enough now the source code is shortly to be released. Things will of course have to be scaled down but this is perhaps the largest obstacle out of the way. I too think Gish would be a good fit on the Pandora.

 

[Shaun]

If there's one other game I'd LOVE to see make it to the Pandora...

http://www.crayonphysics.com/

Unfortunately I doubt it will happen. Suits the Pandora perfectly though.

 

[Dead1nside]

If there's one other game I'd LOVE to see make it to the Pandora...

http://www.crayonphysics.com/

Unfortunately I doubt it will happen. Suits the Pandora perfectly though.

It's a great game, but it's Windows only at least at the moment and not open source. I agree though, would be perfect.

 

[Tempel]

If there's one other game I'd LOVE to see make it to the Pandora...

http://www.crayonphysics.com/

Unfortunately I doubt it will happen. Suits the Pandora perfectly though.

Numpty Physics is already in the Angstrom repo. But I've never played Crayon Physics, so I can't really tell you how it compares.

 

[Creature XL]

The computation required to run a pixel shader scales with screen resolution. The Pandora has a much smaller screen than your average machine (especially nowadays), so less processing power would be required to run the same pixel shaders. I'm not saying that it's possible, it's just something to keep in mind.

Indeed. I remember a while back, someone compared the SGX 530 pushing 800x480 to a GeForce 6200 pushing 1280x1024.

Probably still too weak, because it's definitely weaker when it comes to raw polys - but who knows for certain?

Let me give you some information, as I just take a break from running this game on my PC with a 6200 gfx card.
Its unplayable in 800x600. I disabled the Noise and bloom-filter and set the shaders to very low. So if the aforementioned comparison is somewhat right then it is not very playable. My CPU is a 2MHz 2GHz Athlon64 (3000+) and it is totally busy doing stuff.



EDIT: lol @ Elwing
I am currently coding on my 1.77MHz Atari XL, that might explain it

 

[quadomatic]

Hmmm...I suppose it could still be optimized though, since Penumbra on Pandora would only have to run on one hardware configuration, not thousands of possible PC hardware combinations, right?

 

[elwing]

My CPU is a 2MHz Athlon64 (3000+) and it is totally busy doing stuff.

hum, guess it explain your performance problem on your PC... :lol:

 

[Kramy]

The 6200 has very weak shader capabilities. GeForce 7's were vastly faster at that sort of stuff, and then GeForce 8's were 20x faster again. Yes, you read that correctly.

A friend and I ran some benchmarks in L4D and TF2. By turning off those shader effects (TF2, bloom, noise, etc.) in TF2, his 7600GT jumped from 20fps to 80fps.

By turning them off for my 8800GS, my framerate jumped from 50fps to ~55fps (but I did have my settings set higher than him)

So a few shader effects were sapping 75% of his card's power, and barely 10% of mine. It really puts things in perspective.

Now, if Wikipedia isn't lying, the SGX530 supports up to DX10 in hardware (just no drivers available) - that means it's got to be at least slightly optimized for shading stuff. I think it's quite possible that it would fair better than a 6200 when it comes to shading.

Now, where would it fair worse?... probably raw polys, fillrate, and it obviously doesn't have the same RAM bandwidth as a desktop videocard. Luckily less polys and lower quality textures will look okay on a smaller screen.

All things considered... a highly optimized port remains within the realm of possibility - but things would definitely have to be tweaked.