Epicenter posted on Jul 20 2006 at 01:58 AM said:
First off, relax. Let me break this down to you ...
#1, The reasoning behind my interest in some sort of hardware rendering engine is twofold, and neither interest has anything to do with making the GP2X a primarily 3D machine-- I'm a strong supporter of the superiority of 2D for its benefits to gameplay over 'pretty polygons' everywhere. I mark the end of the great age of gaming when 3D consoles arrived, for god's sake. My reasons are:
- The Quake engine, and Quake 2 engine. HydraLancer and I have been developing a first-person shooter for a long time that we intended to bring over to the GP2X, and compared to initial performance projections by Craig, performance has been nowhere near what we had hoped for-- e.g. the concept of using a scanline-inteleave rendering method with the ARM920T and 940T working in tandem apparently never came to fruition-- we've had to scale things back a LOT to make a port to the '2x feasible. It involves a lot of belt-tightening and probably a good bit of overclocking; and we all know how much you hate overclocking. But with a disgusting task like software rendering on an Integer-only processor, the result won't be pretty framerate-wise without a lot of creative management of graphics and scaling back more and more and more. This isn't necessary with even a weak GPU to take the load off the 920T.
#2, Adding a 3D core doesn't just spontaneously remove 2D functionality. MES offers a 2D and a 3D accelerator that are distinct units and don't somehow borrow resources from each other.
Well one of your main points is about quake, FPSs, and 3D shooters etc and how they are weak on the GP2X because of the lack of a 3D GPU. Yes you are right there but I don't argue that 3D on the GP2X is weak and would be better off with a 3D GPU.
The point is why bother with 3D at all? As I said there are PLENTY of platforms out there that have 3D games, Quake etc. The PSP is perfect for those, get a mod chip, port Quake, have fun. Also that those games aren't that great on a small screen anyway. If I want 3D I will use a console or PC with a much bigger screen. 3D FPS games on a small screen aren't that great anyway as you lose the immersion.
As for having everything in one chip well if you do that the die size goes up and so does cost. There is this thing about yield, the more crap you stuff on a chip the harder to make, the greater possibilities of defects, the more expensive (that is why Sony has been cutting cores on the PS3, they strted with 9 and are down to 7, yield and cost).
So with that yes something will be removed to make room for the 3D crap. Look at MES offerings now the one with the v-render removes the second core. If what you say is true why not have both cores PLUS v-render? Why did MES put a smaller cache and remove the MMU in the SOC used in the GP2X? Why? see above.
My point is that those transistors would be better put to use making the most kickass 2D GPU in a handheld, rather than a half assed attempt to clone the PSPs 3D hardware. Have a second ARM like now only rather than cripple it, give them both an MMU, a 128K cache, and their own work RAM. With that setup you could emulate any 2D system. If they had a better 2D GPU you would have all of your tiling, alpha channel, scaling/rotation etc as easy clean functions, not some kludge of mapping sprites on polys.
It sounds to me that you really want an XGP. That is fine, buy one of those but why try to turn the next GP3X into a clone of that? Keep them different.