DOOM3

[Letalis Sonus]

So SGX is all there but DSP lacks due to outdated kernel, hmkay.

The missing part people were talking about is OpenGL. The hardware is actually capable of providing OpenGL 2.1, but the driver currently limits us to use OpenGL ES 2.0.

I expect a lot from the DSP (the thing marketed as NEON, right?), if that's the same as an FPU, which, IIRC, made Quake 1 run like hell on the Nokia N95 Handset.

The DSP and NEON are completely different things.


NEON is a custom instruction set for some specialised purposes, under certain circumstances it might be an efficient replacement for an FPU but it's not to be generalised as one.


The DSP is an processor on its own, specialised at handling data streams. It is often powered by an own minimalistic OS and is rather hard to program. The big problem about using it is that currently the available solutions need to statically allocate a certain amount of RAM which wouldn't be available for the rest of the system.


Things like a video decoder would be an adequate use case, but using it as a general purpose FPU is way off its capabilities as well.


Disclaimer: I don't take any responsibilities for this post because of being drunk. Whoppee!

 

[WizardStan]

The missing part people were talking about is OpenGL. The hardware is actually capable of providing OpenGL 2.1, but the driver currently limits us to use OpenGL ES 2.0.

Full featured OGL would be a nice thing to have, but having OGLES isn't really holding it back, certainly not in the "it's not hardware accelerated" sense.

 

[NESnero]

DOOM 3 PC Minimum System Requirements


P4 1.5Ghz CPU (or equivalent).


384MB of RAM.


64MB graphics card (see below for chip details).


2GB of free hard drive space.


Lowest supported GPU is a Geforce 4 MX


Welp, the main problem seems to be CPU speed, as I've heard the Pandora can only overclock to about 1GHZ (without voiding warranty.)

Did you say 1GHZ,mine can overclock to 1.3GHz.

I said it can overclock to 1GHZ without voiding the Pandora's warranty. It CAN overclock higher, but you'd void warranty.

 

[kuru]

Letalis you made yourself perfectly clear despite the booze, thank you, too. All this is very interesting and a tad more complicated than I thought. But I guess I already conveyed that :3

 

[monty]

It's not worth playing with them either, it was rubbish!


Looked good though.

It was very well made. I'd never seen any game that has such consistantly high standards for mood and visuals. Shame it was about as original as lift muzak and somehow hugely less exciting than Doom 1, but I'd say the build quality made it a worthwhile diversion all the same.


I remember an interview given in PC Gamer UK well before it was released (id and their famous "done when its done") in which the designer said something like, "Yes, we're making a game that does the whole range of human emotions: fear, terror, fright, suspense", apparently without irony.


I do also remember id being quite dismissive about the newer GeForce cards and DirectX versions that it was eventually launched with as a minimum spec, so I'm not so suprised it works on lower-end machines than advertised.

 

[notaz]

We don't have full access to the DSP yet which would give us access to better video decoders such as h264, but that is because our kernel is out of date

FFS, not this again.. It has little to do with the old kernel, TI framework RAM requirements and codecs being not free to use are the real problems..

 

[WizardStan]

I wasn't aware those were problems, just points of contention.


Last I heard, getting either link or bridge to compile for the .27 kernel was not going to work, there are just too many dependent files that changed with .32 to make back porting easy. Whether we give up RAM to it or what codecs we can use seem to be secondary problems when we can't even talk to the bloody thing, or have I missed some new development the last couple of months?

 

[TitanUranus]

Would there be any reason why someone couldn't create a totally microscopic OS with just minimal drivers that would ONLY boot straight into DOOM3? That would free up system resources and could of course be useful for other demanding stuff. All that would be needed would be a separate game specific SD card, if you want to play the game, you boot it. Much as you would on one of those mass produced games devices.

 

[slaeshjag]

Would there be any reason why someone couldn't create a totally microscopic OS with just minimal drivers that would ONLY boot straight into DOOM3? That would free up system resources and could of course be useful for other demanding stuff. All that would be needed would be a separate game specific SD card, if you want to play the game, you boot it. Much as you would on one of those mass produced games devices.

First of all: That would take a crazy amounyt of work. And then, we got the problem of undocumented hardware. The SGX; we have no idea of how it works. It might however be possible to create a stripped down linux distro with just the stuff required to run doom3 and nothing else, but that would probably take quite a lot of work as well.

 

[Disco Devil]

Interesting thread,


So do we currently have enough resources available for someone to attempt this, or is it all just theoretical..?

 

[TrashyMG]

Interesting thread,


So do we currently have enough resources available for someone to attempt this, or is it all just theoretical..?

Well id software still needs to release the source code.. which they won't until they release the idtech 5 (Rage) engine.

 

[TitanUranus]

Blah blah bla....

First of all: That would take a crazy amounyt of work. And then, we got the problem of undocumented hardware. The SGX; we have no idea of how it works. It might however be possible to create a stripped down linux distro with just the stuff required to run doom3 and nothing else, but that would probably take quite a lot of work as well.

Why would it take a crazy amount of work? Can't a basic debian OS be built in a modular fashion?

 

[slaeshjag]

Blah blah bla....

First of all: That would take a crazy amounyt of work. And then, we got the problem of undocumented hardware. The SGX; we have no idea of how it works. It might however be possible to create a stripped down linux distro with just the stuff required to run doom3 and nothing else, but that would probably take quite a lot of work as well.

Why would it take a crazy amount of work? Can't a basic debian OS be built in a modular fashion?

You didn't write it in a way that looked like "a minimal OS" == "a minimal linux distribution", but that you suggesred, a net minimal OS

 

[notaz]

Last I heard, getting either link or bridge to compile for the .27 kernel was not going to work, there are just too many dependent files that changed with .32 to make back porting easy. Whether we give up RAM to it or what codecs we can use seem to be secondary problems when we can't even talk to the bloody thing, or have I missed some new development the last couple of months?

Not sure about bridge but from what I've seen Link has little kernel dependencies and should compile for .27 fine, there it just no one to do it.