Intel Gma 500 = Sgx 535


Phawx

Phawx

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Hey fellas,

I was looking for a netbook for my wife because she likes my Asus N10j and I came across the Dell Mini 12.

Now the Dell mini 12 uses the GMA 500 gfx chip running at 200 Mhz and I remember seeing on the wiki that the GMA 500 == SGX 535.

What the Pandora uses is the little brother to the SGX 535, the SGX 530. On the wiki it says the 535 can do 28M polys and the 530 can do 14M polys.

I've seen different numbers being thrown around for the frequency the 530 runs at, but I thought its max freq is 166Mhz. I'm rambling but the point I wanted to make is the 535 is better than the 530 and this site: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-I...ok.13607.0.html says they benched the Dell Mini 12 with a 697 score on 3D mark 2001! So the 530 has to be quite less performance wise, which made me rather glum.

My Asus N10 gets about 11,000 3DMark 2001 score with its 9300m and the Atom 1.6 clocked to 2.1Ghz. It can run modern-ish games relatively well. I haven't tested Doom 3, but Prey runs okay at 800x600. I'm just worried that the Pandora won't run doom 3. Maybe in that mode with a reduced resolution of 400x240, but even then I would think some effects would have to be turned down.

Looking for a bit of input from some others on their thoughts.
 
The GMA 500 has horrible drivers. They're dragging performance down a lot.

That said - the SGX was designed with low power devices in mind, like cellphones. It may be fine for a netbook for video conferencing and watching youtube, but it probably wasn't designed for PC games.

Does the chip even support DirectX, or is everything fed through wrappers?

Edit: Clarified what I was talking about. I don't care to look up the GMA 500's specs - but it seems to be a pattern that when Intel releases a new IGP, it has worse performance than the older IGPs, until they sort the drivers out.
 
The Pandora isn't likely to run Doom 3 until someone at id software finally gives the thumbs-up to open the engine.

Which is likely to be at least a year or two.

You're also not likely to see a lot of games on the Pandora requiring 14 or 28 million polygons, if that is even possible outside of lab conditions [no textures, etc.]
 
well the driver are terrible... there are big issues with it on newer linux kernels (im talking about the GMA 500)

The GMA 500 is capable of directx 10.1 and SM 4.0 or better in fact it is more capable from a functional perspective than the 4500MHD since it can support the newer APIs

profomance on a "TEST" does not equal real world proformace..... most desktop GPUs are designed to do wll on those benchmarks whereas the SGX could care less
 
hypothetically speaking, my guess is that pandora's SGX should be able to run doom3 just fine (with potential line doubler) sans the shadow volumes algorithm used in doom3, which algorithm is a hog. instead, depth textures should perform better.

ed: yes, gma500 has dx drivers. moreover, last time i checked they were in better shape than gma500's desktop gl drivers for linux.
 
. . . Prey runs okay at 800x600. I'm just worried that the Pandora won't run doom 3. Maybe in that mode with a reduced resolution of 400x240, but even then I would think some effects would have to be turned down.

Looking for a bit of input from some others on their thoughts.



Pandora is only an 800x480 device.

The game would need to be ported for the ARM processor and Linux Operating System, so as long as you go to that trouble you can make some low-poly and low-res textures, or whatever.

When a high-quality game runs on the Pandora it will probably be optimized a fair bit.
 
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I would definitely play Doom 3 with graphics like that! Specular lighting and bump mapping don't make the game fun! B)

Plus when Doom 3 is ported to the Pandora it will likely have better graphics than that after some refinement.
 
The Voodoo 2 is way less powerful than the SGX. When ported, Doom 3 will look almost as nice on the desktop.
 
Volvagia said:
I would definitely play Doom 3 with graphics like that! Specular lighting and bump mapping don't make the game fun! B)

True, but by the look of it it has no lighting whatsoever, which, in a game like Doom 3, does change the "fun" factor :p
Probably a limit of the Voodoo2 card though. I'd bet the SGX can do a lot better.
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I wonder how you guys can claim Doom3 would look as good on Pandora as it does on a desktop... On what basis can you say that ?

Anyway, this won't happen unless id open sources their id tech 4 engine.
 
MDave said:
I'm guessing the SGX in the omap3 is slightly more powerful than a Geforce 256, but with shader support. And it does a few things more optimized then a GeForce 256.

When doom3 came out GeForce 256 was below requirements. Even a GeForce 4 TI 4200 had low framerate @800x600 low quality (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/matching-doom3-graphics-card,859-6.html). And the TI 4200 was much faster than the GeForce 256.
Click to expand...
 
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Laurent said:
I wonder how you guys can claim Doom3 would look as good on Pandora as it does on a desktop... On what basis can you say that ?
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doom3 was written for gf256/gf2 class hardware on the gpu side.

ed: ok, let me elaborate. the one thing doom3 stressed the gpu (and not only) with was its shadows algorithm - a gpu would need two-sided stencils to be able to carry efficiently doom3's stencil volumes. i believe that was introduced only later in the gf line. another thing was the unconditional multi-pass rendition - particularly the 1st pass laying out the scene's depth and ambience info had to be extremely efficient on the hw. well, SGX just _excels_ there : ) the subsequent passes required for each individual light sources in the scene are also a bit of an obsolete approach today - you'd want to collapse all that in a single-pass shader on modern gpu's. put in other words, doom3's appearance can be reproduced much more efficiently on something like the SGX today.
 
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One of my old laptops had a Geforce 4 go mx (equivalent to a desktop GF2 I believe) and I managed to play Doom 3 :p Sure, I had to put everything on low, and play at 512 x 384 resolution for a playable framerate (30fps ish) but I enjoyed it nonetheless because it was basically pixel doubled on my laptop's screen. I hooked it up to a SDTV though most of the time so it wasn't so blocky though :)
 
I don't expect great frame rates at 800*480, I expect it will still look excellent and be much smoother at 400*240 - PSP games look good at that res after all and our hardware supports it.
 
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