Pandora Not Powerful Enough?

[Kangal]

Hi all,

Just to begin I am not a dev and a newbie Pandora fan, so don't BURN me but inform me nicely
That being said I love the concept of Pandora!!
But after some little research on forums and whatnot from actual devs, I was really disappointed
It seems Pandora is not powerful enough (check wording). It is the most powerful handheld (actually it isn't, its a very powerful computer/pda).
BUTTT, pandora was designed to emulate other consoles and as most will know an emulator copies the processes in the original console to the new one and this is never effecient thus more powerful hardware is necessary to compensate for this.


WHY do I say Pandora is not fast enough, have a look at the graphics power of other consoles:
I was told polygons/sec (PPS) is the important aspect of console expectations
Eg Polygons/sec is like horsepower of a car where as the processor speed (MHz) is like its engine capacity
(eg/ 3.4L Pontiac can produce 190hp where 2.0L VW can make 240hp) --> not logical but reality

Here are the max. polygons/sec according to gameplay-conditions (textures, curvature, lighting etc) of each console:

PS3 - irrelivant
X-360 - irrelivant
Wii - not published

Xbox - 100M (million) reported --> but this is exagerrated and believed to be about 30M (!!!!)
Gamecube - 12M reported --> tested to be roughly 20M (was understated: 12M is during normal play, 20M is highest possible under game conditions)
PS2 - 66M reported --> tested to be roughly 18M (but first-gen games are below 8M due to game developers not taking full advantage
PSP - 33M reported --> tested to be roughly 10M
Dreamcast - 7M reported --> tested to be roughly 9M (was understated: 7M is during normal play, 9M is highest possible under game conditions)
PS1 - 360K
Nintendo 64 - 150K


I believe Pandora will be sort of in direct competition to the PSP (2K's cause of hack/homebrew).
And the only way I believe the wide community will fork out money to buy this powerful system is if it can accomplish its expectations.
I believe it would become more popular and supported if it managed to emulate PSP at a very decent rate, showing to the public "look you don't need to risk bricking your PSP, buy a pandora it plays powerful games like PSP and emulates earlier consoles and is a complete PC"

And for this to be possible Pandora must be have a pretty high PPS.
I was thinking graphics potential (max. PPS under gameplay conditions) of 19M
How I deduced this:
Handheld performance = Emulator speed / Emulator effeciency
= Console performance (PPS) x Console emulator performance (%) / Emulator effeciency (%)
Example = 10M (PSP's power) x (games run at 85% of normal rate) / (great effecient emulator)
= 18 x 0.85 / 0.45 = 18.89M polygons per sec

19M PPS!!! This is more powerful than the PS2 and relative to Gamecube. So PS2/Gamecube emulator would never be playable on such powerful device but PSP will.


Note the stats of Pandora's graphic capabilities is never fully given ("few million polygons per sec").
This statement implies of something between 5-10M. This is half of what's needed.

Also note making an emulator is very difficult, especially one's with high graphical features of PSP or higher.
If a perfect code is written it will increase effeciency and directly affect gameplay/threshold of device power.
This is near impossible.

If the Pandora's hardware reach about 13.5 PPS, and a good emulator is written, dreamcast can be played.
But I reacon dreamcast is dead and the amount of people who will buy Pandora for Dreamcast is very miniscule compared to the people that expect a PSP emulator.
But I've seen a demo of dreamcast on Pandora (I dont have link anymore) and its too slow/unplayable.
So I think this supports to my prediction when I say the Pandora's PPS is 7M - 11M.
Don't be disuaded, 11M for a handheld is very high. On par with PSP, but thats cause Sony has a headstart (they have pro's that can utilize the little processors to its limits whereas Pandora is makeshift and can easily surpass if given guidance/pro dev teams.

By all this I mean N64 emulator on PSP will be poor/mediocre but way better on Pandora. But PSP can play PSP games and obvious advantage as more titles continue to be released.
Sorry for the comparison to PSP, dont want to start a PSP vs Pandora thread just sharing what I researched.

EDDIT:
I just wished if the Pandora dev's actually made emulators for Linux, improved on them, made the drivers ... then selected hardware that can accomplish it.
This way they would've done with the hard stuff, get CE approved, get units made, advertise their accomplishments, then release units polished with beautiful themes cases with emuators ready. ---> much more supporters as people would wait less time for units, can even charge more for efforts of emulator.

If in any area I made a mistake please TELL me, not scream at me. I am genuinly interested in Pandora but I just wanted to clearly know its limits.
Again I'm not a dev just graduate. Thanks for all that reply with technical info or development expertise. Happy o'ten!

 

[ndbsolar]

I'm not a dev, but surely you can compare the specs to other handeld devices and make a good judgement from there? It's right up there with an iphone in terms of power... Also, the Pandora is not an emulation only machine, just think of it as a pocket computer with gaming controls.

[EDIT] You might get a better response in the dev forum... Or maybe not

 

[CasperN]

The rule is to play games you own right? ok no one cares, but some do. anyway, nes, snes isn't very portable right?
The psp is portable, if you want to play psp games, simpely buy a psp, you can find psp extremely cheap today, same with games for it, and then you can play the games. not as easy with the other consoles which need a big monitor or a powercord.

Forget the whole thing about emulate the psp it won't happen. Maybe gameboy games....

 

[fischju2000]

The SGX530, same as in the Pandora, is listed as doing 13.5m polygons/sec at 200mhz from what I've found. Every piece of the main hardware is known, why not actually look up the given stats for these? Cortex A8 does about 2.0 DMIPS/MHz. These stats are nearly useless for what you are trying to determine though.

 

[gruso]

This is a little like reading the beer label to decide how drunk you'll get. There are lots of videos out there demonstrating what the platform can do already. A Youtube speaks a thousand spec lists, if you will.

 

[trats20050]

Huh, i think people have known this since the beginning of Pandora.
At the beginning people thought it wasn't even possible to emulate N64 now we know it can.
I don't think its fair to compare Pandoras specs to full gaming systems.
Hopefully this is just the beginning and some day Pandoras descendants will emulate more gaming systems.

And thanks for the detailed review of what everybody in the forum already knew.
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=47518

 

[timofonic]

wrote a very lenghty post as reply, but the damn forum has some login problem and all has been lost!

I got quite upset about it and don't want to write it again. Anyway, you can think it for yourself by reading the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator#Emulation_in_preservation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation#Emulation


If no other people writes a enough good reply emulation and hardware, I'll write one later. I don't promise to be good, just informative.

I hope others write a better one than I can do before, I got lazy after the forum problem. I know there are people that know about emulators a lot than me and they are computer programmers too, so probably you'll find a nice reply to be used as template as an article for Pandorawiki (Gruso, this could be a nice idea to make n00bs learn about what emulators really are without pointless discussions).

EDIT: I found Pandorawiki has an interesting article. It needs some more explaining about certain topics, specially some technical bits written by some expert, but it's nice as introduction: http://pandorawiki.org/Emulators

 

[Nintendo]

Yeah, I agree. YouTube vids will tell the real story.
And the fact remains that Pandora can crunch numbers just like the 5th and 6th generation of home consoles. andora2ut4: B)

 

[mali]

I believe Pandora will be sort of in direct competition to the PSP (2K's cause of hack/homebrew).

I have to disagree. About half of the people(if peca's survey is roughly representative) bought it as an UMPC/MID. CPU power, screen resolution, battery life etc. are more important to those people than graphics stuff. The PSP is completely useless for that usage scenario. Even those who bought it mainly for gaming will love Pandoras other benefits PSP can't compete at all.

 

[ldesnogu]

I'm not sure I should give my point of view, but here it is anyway.

I don't think the GPU of Pandora is underpowered. I'd rather say it's the CPU that is, and this will be the blocking point for emulation and other tasks.

 

[LineOf7s]

This may come across as elitist, exclusionary and condescending, but all I saw in the original post are the perhaps valid observations of someone who doesn't *get* the Pandora.

Not a crime, and no hard feelings... but nothing you said means much to those who do.

 

[MDave]

It's a real shame they didn't go with the SGX535 instead. Around double the GPU performance? Man how that would help with the sort of games I plan on porting. It would put it on the same level as the GPU used in the atom.

 

[kingoddball]

The pandora was planned over two years ago, yes?
It's a pretty good device considering how long ago it was designed!

If you think it's underpowered, then don't order one.
As it has been stated above, it's not just about emulation.

If the scene had some great 3D artists and they had time to create a high res, high end game, then it could easily walk all over a PSP and its games.
The games on PSP are great looking, but the majority of them are just prettied up PSX games. GTA is a great series on the PSP tho!
MGS - PO is not even very good looking, and that was meant to be a standout game.

Forget what the pandora can or can't emulate, just wait and see what it can do once it has been released to the masses.
Come back in a year, and see how the scene has turned out and if there are any nice 3D games..
Emulation is just a nice bonus! andora2ut4: h34r:


Some people may get very offended.

 

[andys]

It's a real shame they didn't go with the SGX535 instead. Around double the GPU performance? Man how that would help with the sort of games I plan on porting. It would put it on the same level as the GPU used in the atom.

It would have been nice - but obviously they are limited to what TI (and other companies) provide. If companies start to push up graphics performance, then you might find they increase the performance in the OMAP4. From cursory readings, the 720Mhz one is faster than the bog standard one, as it can super-duper clock the SGX.

From rough readings, the OMAP4 is likely to be ~4x as powerful as the base OMAP3, (based solely on 540 being 2x as fast and a probably higher clockspeed) - but they might stick a faster chip in there if they need to compete with others.

That said - I don't work for TI, so take this with a large grain of salt

 

[krosfyah]

I believe Pandora will be sort of in direct competition to the PSP (2K's cause of hack/homebrew).

I don't see this as a good comparison as the PSP is much older and less than half the price.

Perhaps when the PSP2 is released later this year (and providing it can be opened for homebrew) then that will be similar in terms of emulation capability. Although, going by your basis of polgons/sec it might not be a good comparison either since it's rumoured to have the SGX543 quad which can put out 133 million/s.

 

[Paradox]

Pandora Not Powerful Enough?

not powerful enough for what?

It is the most powerful handheld (actually it isn't, its a very powerful computer/pda).

yes it is

 

[eeekubuntu]

why compare a handheld with a stationary console?

 

[JayFoxRox]

Hi all,

Just to begin I am not a dev and a newbie Pandora fan, so don't BURN me but inform me nicely
That being said I love the concept of Pandora!!
But after some little research on forums and whatnot from actual devs, I was really disappointed
It seems Pandora is not powerful enough (check wording). It is the most powerful handheld (actually it isn't, its a very powerful computer/pda).
BUTTT, pandora was designed to emulate other consoles and as most will know an emulator copies the processes in the original console to the new one and this is never effecient thus more powerful hardware is necessary to compensate for this.

It was not designed for that. It was designed to replace the gp2x, but later completly changed and it was designed with goals similar to existing open-source handhelds. Freedom in mind, not emulation
You don't get the concept of the Pandora it seems, but read on :unsure:

WHY do I say Pandora is not fast enough, have a look at the graphics power of other consoles:
I was told polygons/sec (PPS) is the important aspect of console expectations
Eg Polygons/sec is like horsepower of a car where as the processor speed (MHz) is like its engine capacity
(eg/ 3.4L Pontiac can produce 190hp where 2.0L VW can make 240hp) --> not logical but reality

Here are the max. polygons/sec according to gameplay-conditions (textures, curvature, lighting etc) of each console:

PS3 - irrelivant
X-360 - irrelivant
Wii - not published

Xbox - 100M (million) reported --> but this is exagerrated and believed to be about 30M (!!!!)
Gamecube - 12M reported --> tested to be roughly 20M (was understated: 12M is during normal play, 20M is highest possible under game conditions)
PS2 - 66M reported --> tested to be roughly 18M (but first-gen games are below 8M due to game developers not taking full advantage
PSP - 33M reported --> tested to be roughly 10M
Dreamcast - 7M reported --> tested to be roughly 9M (was understated: 7M is during normal play, 9M is highest possible under game conditions)
PS1 - 360K
Nintendo 64 - 150K

Can't you see how useless this is? Polygons / sec, what kind of a unit is that?
Doesn't it also depend on how these polygons are rendered, if there is lighting, if they are calculated per pixel (pixelshading, hooray), ..
Also the graphics chip is seldomly the bottleneck, physics is also a demanding part. Also think about the fact that our resolution and screen size are not too great, therefore you can keep the poly-count low while the is no visible error for the user. (Hell.. some people still think the PSP is a portable PS2 because of its graphics)

I believe Pandora will be sort of in direct competition to the PSP (2K's cause of hack/homebrew).
And the only way I believe the wide community will fork out money to buy this powerful system is if it can accomplish its expectations.
I believe it would become more popular and supported if it managed to emulate PSP at a very decent rate, showing to the public "look you don't need to risk bricking your PSP, buy a pandora it plays powerful games like PSP and emulates earlier consoles and is a complete PC"

Read the first part again. It's not supposed to compete against one of the mainstream consoles. See it as something completly different.
Ironicly enough you already pointed out that emulation adds lots of overhead - so wouldn't it make a lot more sense to encourage developers to develop (native applications) for the system?
However, its not supposed to be as popular as the PSP (at least not now.., no-one cares about the public - the community is the important aspect, because not the pandora-team develops software, but the community. And they do it for themselves and not for the public)

And for this to be possible Pandora must be have a pretty high PPS.
I was thinking graphics potential (max. PPS under gameplay conditions) of 19M
How I deduced this:
Handheld performance = Emulator speed / Emulator effeciency
= Console performance (PPS) x Console emulator performance (%) / Emulator effeciency (%)
Example = 10M (PSP's power) x (games run at 85% of normal rate) / (great effecient emulator)
= 18 x 0.85 / 0.45 = 18.89M polygons per sec

19M PPS!!! This is more powerful than the PS2 and relative to Gamecube. So PS2/Gamecube emulator would never be playable on such powerful device but PSP will.

Who said graphics are the problem? The CPU is a lot lot lot lot slower to emulate. Maybe you should check out some emulators source-code or just read some docs about it.
Graphics is usually just passing over commands from the original system while the CPU instructions have to be changed to be executed on the host CPU (PSP = MIPS CPU, Pandora = ARM CPU)

Note the stats of Pandora's graphic capabilities is never fully given ("few million polygons per sec").
This statement implies of something between 5-10M. This is half of what's needed.

14MP/s via wiki. You'll find the same figures on the ImgTec page I guess.
However, This will most likely not be the problem... especially not with the PSP graphics being limited by several other things.

Also note making an emulator is very difficult, especially one's with high graphical features of PSP or higher.
If a perfect code is written it will increase effeciency and directly affect gameplay/threshold of device power.
This is near impossible.

The newest renderer of my PSP emulator is almost completly done and it was written in only a few days. However, besides caching and eliminating useless matrix calculations there is not much which can be optimized for now as all it does is forwarding commands and putting renderstates into shaders.
The CPU and Firmware emulation however is a large task and will take a long time to be even half done.

If the Pandora's hardware reach about 13.5 PPS, and a good emulator is written, dreamcast can be played.
But I reacon dreamcast is dead and the amount of people who will buy Pandora for Dreamcast is very miniscule compared to the people that expect a PSP emulator.
But I've seen a demo of dreamcast on Pandora (I dont have link anymore) and its too slow/unplayable.
So I think this supports to my prediction when I say the Pandora's PPS is 7M - 11M.
Don't be disuaded, 11M for a handheld is very high. On par with PSP, but thats cause Sony has a headstart (they have pro's that can utilize the little processors to its limits whereas Pandora is makeshift and can easily surpass if given guidance/pro dev teams.

Dreamcast is an awesome system, I doubt full-speed emulation is that close and therefore I'm not expecting it, even tho I wish we had it.
Also the Pandora is not even released yet, I guess more people will try to help once it arrives.
You have been proven wrong on the "PPS" and you were told that graphics emulation is not the problem so I won't repeat it.

By all this I mean N64 emulator on PSP will be poor/mediocre but way better on Pandora. But PSP can play PSP games and obvious advantage as more titles continue to be released.
Sorry for the comparison to PSP, dont want to start a PSP vs Pandora thread just sharing what I researched.

Why did you even compare them? I see no sense in this. Most people in this community probably don't even care about the commercial PSP games.
And yes, N64 emulation will be (or is already imo) better than on PSP - but that doesn't have to do much with the graphics processor (even though it might be a bottleneck on the PSP for some games, but they would still be slower than on Pandora because the CPU emulation is required to even execute graphics calls)

EDDIT:
I just wished if the Pandora dev's actually made emulators for Linux, improved on them, made the drivers ... then selected hardware that can accomplish it.
This way they would've done with the hard stuff, get CE approved, get units made, advertise their accomplishments, then release units polished with beautiful themes cases with emuators ready. ---> much more supporters as people would wait less time for units, can even charge more for efforts of emulator.

You miss the point once more. The "Pandora dev"s are not those who write the emulators. Normal people like you and me do that and they are not paid for it neither.
They are most likely working with linux emulators anyway and do "some" optimizations and tweaks to be Pandora-compatible. However, a normal desktop PC is entirly different from the Pandora (speaking emulation wise) and you can't test your emulators on a normal linux PC - you need some sort of ARM CPU to run Pandora applications and so, even if you picked hardware in the end, you would have to pick development hardware first. And changing from dev. to release hardware will add huge problems probably. You are summarizing the project like its a weekend project - however, you are even half right with your way of doing things. But it couldn't have been done much different. The hardware must exist so emulators can be developed (while games are somewhat easier to port)

If in any area I made a mistake please TELL me, not scream at me. I am genuinly interested in Pandora but I just wanted to clearly know its limits.
Again I'm not a dev just graduate. Thanks for all that reply with technical info or development expertise. Happy o'ten!

It's hard to not to do.

However, some final words: Graphics wise the Pandora will be able to produce somewhat more impressive effects than the PSP - maybe you have to drop some details from the games, but you can create kick-ass effects like you see in todays desktop games. Something the PSP can't do at all. They call it "shading" - vertexshaders and pixelshaders..
CPU wise the Pandora puts away the PSP easily.
The only valid argument seems to be that the PSP has commercial games. But there are not too many good ones and you have to pay for them. With Pandora you get the freedom to do more than just games, you get work by the community mostly free and you can run a lot more emulators (which have lots of great games which you can't use on the PSP..) because the PSP was just not powerful enough to run them.

 

[shunun]

As time drags out, the pandora seems less amazing. It's kind of depressing. I hope it can emulate gba fullspeed, that'd make my day.

 

[Nintendo]

As time drags out, the pandora seems less amazing. It's kind of depressing. I hope it can emulate gba fullspeed, that'd make my day.

Amazing compared to what???