How powerful is the Open Pandora?

[sswam]

Great. You have a high resolution screen with a very good dpi to... scale up! Because the cpu is too slow to calculate directly for a 800x480 screen? That doesn't argue for the pandora being quite fast.

You're right of course that more processing power is required to render the more detailed images at 800x480.  But Pandora does have enough processing power to do this, in most cases at least.

I wrote a game for Pandora in C using GLES2, it runs very well at 800 x 480 x 60Hz on a 600Mhz Pandora.  It does physics, bitmap operations, floating point math, random numbers, etc.  I did not have to cut anything out for the Pandora version, in fact if I recall correctly it runs better on the Pandora versus some netbooks.

Other people have also written and ported games using the full resolution and refresh rate.  With per-pixel software rendering, we can spend an average of 27 to 46 CPU cycles per pixel at 800 x 480 x 60Hz.  Pandora can emulate complex systems such as PSX, N64, DS and render at full resolution with good frame rate for many games.  Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast has been ported (beta for now) and appears to run at a good rate.  I'd say the Pandora CPU, GPU, RAM, etc are plenty fast enough to run many well-written games at the full screen resolution.

Did you find your Sparrow 3D has difficulty with the higher resolution of the Pandora?

Perhaps it can work faster if you add some ARM Neon assembly code, you could talk to _wb_ or Notaz about that.

If you want to zoom fully calculated Mandelbrot sets in real time, you might need a faster system.  For most other things, Pandora is good for it.

 

[_wb_]

"fully calculated Mandelbrot sets" - I think you need infinite speed and storage for that

 

[elwing]

"fully calculated Mandelbrot sets" - I think you need infinite speed and storage for that

even to store just one coordinate you'd need infinite storage... your 128bits variable won't be enough