GPD Win (x86 Computer / Palmtop)

[Alperoot]

I guess we must wait for a prototype. Until then we wait a lot of videos from the Pyra prototype. Make us happy, ED and play popular things like Minecraft on the Pyra!

Q: Still nothing from 3D acceleration?

 

[Chip]

You take things for granted on the Win that are not yet tested or known, yet you also mention things will NOT run on the Pyra (like Netflix, etc.), even though this also hasn't been tested.

Until someone tries, no one can tell.

The hardware is the hardware. There are other devices with the same SoC, same RAM, and roughly the same resolution, running the same OS. There really aren't any other factors that would differentiate the performance between the win and any of the tablets/netbooks built to the same specs. I don't have access to one of those devices, so I can't test specifics - I can only go by videos that others have posted. Those videos show that at least some PS2 games are playable, and it's more than fair to "assume" the win will have identical capability. I've amended my earlier post with the word "partial" to indicate that PS2 emulation won't be perfect.

Granted, I've only done some initial poking around into premium video streaming on ARM linux, but every result indicates it isn't currently possible without a convoluted workaround. You have a functioning pyra, so if there is a way to get netflix/amazon/HBO-go/etc working on it, then I'd be happy to admit that I was mistaken on that front.

 

[TrashyMG]

Well for streaming video services, sure Pyra does have an android solution if all else fails, but no one here really has any love for Android. Perhaps some Android layer could work as well. But yeah for Netflix in the browser, there seems to be some missing element in chromium that doesn't allow for it to work, I played with it a bit. I wish I had the chance of testing x86 chrome with Exagear Desktop and Netflix, but my devboard is out of commission at the moment. Just like John Snow, I know nothing, about HBO go...

 

[EvilDragon]

N64 is playable for some games on the Pandora (Mario64 and Mario Kart... all others I tried are not playable for me), Dreamcast isn't playable and PSP only for some games as well (like Pirates or Lumines).

I wouldn't call those playable.

However, if you only show Mario64 on the Pandora, it looks like it's awesome... same for some PSP games.

Even DraStic is unplayable for more complex games on the Pandora, but if you show something like New Super Mario Bros., it looks perfect.

I think it's similar on the videos you found about Wii and PS2 emulation.
The Wii game is very simple, and as I'm playing most of my PS2 games via emulation, I know exactly where the issues are.

Suikoden 3, for example, runs fullspeed mostly all of the time on my big PC.
However, as soon as magic is being used more in fights, it slows down a lot, because of the transparency effects.

My PC can run the games at 3x speed normally, but barely reaches half the speed when these effects happen.

It's similar with Atelier Iris 2, a simple 2D game: There is one isometric area which was covered in mist... which lead to a lot of slowdowns.

That's all on a PC with a passmark 7 times as high as the zx8500 SoC...

It can happen in any game during gameplay, which is especially annoying (as you might have to stop playing halfway through)

The video that showed PCSX2 on the tablet didn't have any transparency effects or many objects, but it already was running with frameskip slower than fullspeed.

Yes, some games might run, but most probably won't, it's similar to PSP emulation on the Pandora.

Now, I won't say what the Pyra will be able to do. I have no clue, time will tell.
But then again, you should do the same for the Win. I don't know how well it can run PS2 or Wii, but you took it for granted in your list that it CAN easily do it, and I'm very sceptical here.

So saying the Pyra can't run Netflix or gaming streams (when it might be possible with ExaGear or an Android wrapper) while saying the Win can run PS2 and Wii emulation at playable speeds it pretty biassed towards the Win.

We don't know that. We'll see when people played around with what'll be possible, and we can assume it might be able to do that, but that cannot be said for certain for any of those two systems.

 

[levi]

The hardware is the hardware. There are other devices with the same SoC, same RAM, and roughly the same resolution, running the same OS. There really aren't any other factors that would differentiate the performance between the win and any of the tablets/netbooks built to the same specs.

Apart from it throttling back if the heat evacuation isn't keeping up with things. That will differ between different case solutions, though from a cold start there should be less difference. I suppose also storage speed will also have an impact, given Windows tendency to page everything out even before it runs out of RAM, but I'm not sure how slow discs have to be to affect performance when it's only swapping out.

But yeah, I'm impressed by those emulators running on those tablets, which proves the chip has some oomph.

 

[Chip]

I suppose also storage speed will also have an impact, given Windows tendency to page everything out even before it runs out of RAM, but I'm not sure how slow discs have to be to affect performance when it's only swapping out.

It shouldn't have much impact on any disc-based system emulation. Recommended RAM for PCSX2 is only 2GB. The PS2/GC/Wii consoles had minuscule amounts of RAM (32MB/43MB/88MB), and while I don't know how much overhead the emulator itself needs, there should be more than enough to go around without having to do much swapping. The EMMC is certainly faster than the original disc transfer speed so load times should be better than on the actual system.

Windows games is another matter. EMMC is significantly slower than a conventional hard drive, and with 4GB of shared RAM being at or near the minimum requirements for newer games, I suspect there will be a lot of swapping going on. You can see it in the delayed texture loading in some of the PC games in the videos already posted - even with the draw distance dialed way down, it takes longer to pull up the textures than it should.

I am concerned about heat as well. The XD has some notorious heat-related problems, mostly due to the idiotic design choice of sandwiching the SoC between the PCB and the battery. There is some conjecture (though no confirmation) that they'll move the chip to the top of the board for the win, so it won't be so insulated. I can only hope they're smart enough to do that.

 

[levi]

Yes, but even just booting up a windows machine and not running any software on it, it starts paging out lesser used services to disc. It probably doesn't make much difference though, since it ought to be doing that purely in the background, so unless it actually runs out of RAM that it hasn't already paged out, it shouldn't slow down just take longer to stop writing to long term storage.

 

[comradekingu]

If you are getting a GPD WIN to play PS2 and Wii games, then you either have some specific game in mind, or there is a bit of a mismatch.
It may be the best handheld at this particular task, for which a desktop computer with similar architecture struggles given the right circumstances.

GPD themselves entertain the idea that you can play FPS and moba games on a handheld. Not only wishful thinking, but short of rational thought.

That being said, there probably is a sweetspot that the GPD win excels at.

As for the pyra, netflix is quite far removed from how its usergroup does things, I could be wrong. But if there is anything about getting things to work that can work, this community gives any prospect use-case a more than fair chance.

Edit: I know very little about netflix, but it appears also on ARM it runs as HTML5+some DRM in the chrome browser.

Edit2: I also know very little about a GPD win, as i havent used one, but lets say the keyboard works with 10 fingers, then that is a thing. Additionally you could hook up a mouse, which gives some credibility to the possibility of moba and FPS. Then again that isnt a handheld anymore. It is for those things a stationary, albeit small, regular laptop.

 

[EvilDragon]

[QUOTE="Chip, post: 1371026, member: 897"
I am concerned about heat as well. The XD has some notorious heat-related problems, mostly due to the idiotic design choice of sandwiching the SoC between the PCB and the battery. [/QUOTE]

Hm? Last time I opened the XD, the SoC was on top of the PCB, not at the side where the battery is.
With a full metal frame surrounding it and an additional heat-dissipation layer between the mainboard and the battery.

 

[Exophase]

Even DraStic is unplayable for more complex games on the Pandora, but if you show something like New Super Mario Bros., it looks perfect.

Off-topic, but this is kind of harsh, all the games in my test set will run at realtime speed w/fs1 with the possible exception of one that's doing some unusual CPU heavy stuff. This is on a non-overclocked 1GHz Pandora, so you can get 15%+ more w/overclocking. I think only a small minority of pathological games like Golden Sun would really be unplayable. I will be very impressed if PCSX2 on Atom x5-8550 comes anywhere remotely close to this level of support.

Underlying point still stands though, there are always going to be games that stress a system much less than average. There are some DS games I could find that would run full speed w/o frameskip on a CC Pandora clocked under 300MHz. There is likely something like a 10x performance gap between the bottom 5% least demanding games and the top 5% most demanding games. Part of this is because of real utilization differences and part of this is because of differing things that work well or poorly on emulators.

For emulators where all of the graphics are rendered by the GPU the gap is probably even bigger.

However, I still think it's worth listing PS2 and GC as a pro for GPD Win with heavy caveats. Because there is simply a much different level of software support. PCSX2 has shown zero direction of gaining ARM support, Play! is probably years behind in efficiency and compatibility, and Dolphin requires GPU features Pyra won't support. So on GPD Win there will be some class of PS2 games you can play and some (probably smaller) class of GC/Wii games. On Pyra that class will be nearly zero unless some really big software developments happen. At the very least this is a fair statement of how things are right now.

 

[edgex004]

Yeah, off-topic: it may be anecdotal evidence, but I have yet to try a game in Drastic that was unplayable on my 1GHz unit.

 

[EvilDragon]

Off-topic, but this is kind of harsh, all the games in my test set will run at realtime speed w/fs1 with the possible exception of one that's doing some unusual CPU heavy stuff. This is on a non-overclocked 1GHz Pandora, so you can get 15%+ more w/overclocking. I think only a small minority of pathological games like Golden Sun would really be unplayable. I will be very impressed if PCSX2 on Atom x5-8550 comes anywhere remotely close to this level of support.

Don't worry, I didn't mean it to be harsh, DraStic is an AMAZING piece of software, and many games run great on the Pandora, but I also stumbled across a few that didn't. (Okamiden was mostly fine, but some parts were almost unplayable slow, I think Kingdom Hearts also was very slow, as well as some others...)

And while many games run playable, they often use a bit of frameskip, and I know there are gamers out there who are sensitive with that.

However, I still think it's worth listing PS2 and GC as a pro for GPD Win with heavy caveats. Because there is simply a much different level of software support. PCSX2 has shown zero direction of gaining ARM support, Play! is probably years behind in efficiency and compatibility, and Dolphin requires GPU features Pyra won't support. So on GPD Win there will be some class of PS2 games you can play and some (probably smaller) class of GC/Wii games. On Pyra that class will be nearly zero unless some really big software developments happen. At the very least this is a fair statement of how things are right now.

I know the Pyra can't do that (right now) at all, but I learned to be careful with telling people how stuff runs (maybe because of Craig...)
He was telling everyone the Pandora can run fullspeed N64, and in reality, it mostly only was Mario64.
I am rather careful telling someone what any system can do, unless I really know it can do all that in fullspeed.

Also, I haven't played a single PS2 game on my Core i7 which didn't have some slowdowns during gameplay (not right at the beginning, but usually games get more hectic and use more effects in later parts), be it Xenosaga 2 or 3, Suikoden 3, Atelier Iris 2, etc.
So I would be very careful here as well... from my experience on the PC, PCSX2 is VERY very power hungry, even though the Pyra will not be able to run ANY PS2 games from the start (and maybe never do it with the OMAP5), I wouldn't be sure the Win can do it flawlessly.
That's all I'm pointing out here. It might work better as you expect, but it could also work a lot worse than most people expect.
[doublepost=1459270736,1459270683][/doublepost]

Yeah, off-topic: it may be anecdotal evidence, but I have yet to try a game in Drastic that was unplayable on my 1GHz unit.

As mentioned, I stumbled accross some, but forgot which ones they were.

Well Re:Coded doesn't work, but that's not a speed issue - it simply crashes

EDIT: I checked a few things I had on my SD Card.
Final Fantasy: Heroes of the Four Lights has major stuttering, I also remember one of the Mana games had a lot of stuttering...

Maybe I just stumbled accross a few of them accidentally (kind of bad luck )

 

[Chip]

Last time I opened the XD, the SoC was on top of the PCB, not at the side where the battery is.

There was a bunch of discussion about it over on the dingoonity boards shortly after it started shipping and people were noticing throttling issues. Someone claimed to have opened it up and that the SoC was on the bottom, between the PCB and battery. I haven't really looked into it since then. Perhaps they only removed the bottom and just assumed the SoC was under the heat shield?

I'm still concerned about thermals though, as the X5 should be in the same ballpark as the RK3288 heat-wise.

 

[EvilDragon]

There was a bunch of discussion about it over on the dingoonity boards shortly after it started shipping and people were noticing throttling issues. Someone claimed to have opened it up and that the SoC was on the bottom, between the PCB and battery. I haven't really looked into it since then. Perhaps they only removed the bottom and just assumed the SoC was under the heat shield?

Well, it could also be that GPD changed that. I know for sure the XD uses at least two different LCDs, as I opened up two to replace a broken LCD and they had totally different connectors.
Attached are the pictures I took.

Here is the battery, with some heat shield on top of it:


Here is the backside of the PCB, the one facing to the battery:

Clearly, there's no SoC to be seen

And here is the other side of the PCB, with the gaming controls:

The SoC is below that metal cage.

This is where the keyboard is now on the Win, so they will either move it to the backside or (and that's what my guess is) to the empty area on the top side, in the middle between the nubs.

I'm still concerned about thermals though, as the X5 should be in the same ballpark as the RK3288 heat-wise.

That will be the same with the Pyra or mostly any other mobile device out there.
Most users forget that mobile CPUs are not meant to run with full power for extended periods of time. It's there to have fast peaks (i.e. rendering a website, then slowing down again while the user is reading the page).
The only way to run a mobile SoC fullspeed for a longer time is by using a fan, like the Shield does it.

That's something everyone should be aware of.

 

[Chip]

The only way to run a mobile SoC fullspeed for a longer time is by using a fan, like the Shield does it.

There is another way - expose the heatsink to the outside. Cut a section out of the blank space between the pads and glue a thicker (but still thin enough to be flush with the case) sink directly to the SoC. With more sink mass, more surface area (especially if it was milled with fins), and direct contact with outside air, it would handle the heat much better. Alternately, move the Soc to a very thin board behind the display, chip facing out, and use an aluminum cover in direct contact with the chip.

Both of these options probably add more problems than they solve - specifically the damage that could be caused by somebody putting pressure directly on the chip via the heat sink and the potential for minor burns. Neither are options for either the win or pyra at this stage. But those are risks I'd be willing to take for a cooler processor.

 

[Exophase]

EDIT: I checked a few things I had on my SD Card.
Final Fantasy: Heroes of the Four Lights has major stuttering, I also remember one of the Mana games had a lot of stuttering...

Maybe I just stumbled accross a few of them accidentally (kind of bad luck )

This is on a 1GHz unit right? Guess that tells me what games to focus on most for optimizing...

And that one that crashes needs to be looked at >_>

 

[EvilDragon]

There is another way - expose the heatsink to the outside. Cut a section out of the blank space between the pads and glue a thicker (but still thin enough to be flush with the case) sink directly to the SoC. With more sink mass, more surface area (especially if it was milled with fins), and direct contact with outside air, it would handle the heat much better.

The heatsink should not be exposed to the outside - it might cause burns if the SoC runs too hot for a longer time.
You need to keep it inside the case at least, with air venting holes.

Alternately, move the Soc to a very thin board behind the display, chip facing out, and use an aluminum cover in direct contact with the chip.

That won't work for various reasons.

1. Such SoCs need a multilayer board (at least 8 layer).
2. The heat would seriously damage the LCD.
3. You'd need to get the power from the battery up to the lid and also back (for the USB ports). That would need quite a lot of thick wiring...

Both of these options probably add more problems than they solve - specifically the damage that could be caused by somebody putting pressure directly on the chip via the heat sink and the potential for minor burns. Neither are options for either the win or pyra at this stage. But those are risks I'd be willing to take for a cooler processor.

You would risk that, but you'd never be allowed to sell that in the most important countries

 

[EvilDragon]

This is on a 1GHz unit right? Guess that tells me what games to focus on most for optimizing...

And that one that crashes needs to be looked at >_>

Ah, still looking for such reports?
I'll let you know what I can find then
Yep, 1 GHz Pandora running at 1,2GHz speed.

 

[Exophase]

Ah, still looking for such reports?
I'll let you know what I can find then
Yep, 1 GHz Pandora running at 1,2GHz speed.

Of course, reports are always wanted. You can send me a PM or post it on the DraStic thread here or tell me on IRC or something.

 

[Chip]

1. Such SoCs need a multilayer board (at least 8 layer).
2. The heat would seriously damage the LCD.
3. You'd need to get the power from the battery up to the lid and also back (for the USB ports). That would need quite a lot of thick wiring...

Here's a teardown of a chinese tablet doing what I suggest - sinking the heat from an X5 directly into the metal back casing. There doesn't appear to be much of anything insulating the board from the panel, and the reviewer states the chip stays quite cool. I still think this is an idea worth exploring after I win the lottery and can afford to buy engineers to throw at problems like this.