Pandora Vs Eee Pc Specifications


sindbad said:
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the point of this GPU comparison. They're both powerfull enough and the SGX is very powerfull for a handheld. Playing games on the eeepc is unlikely, as it isn't made for that.
Um, Really?

Age of Empires II & Unreal Tournament on the Eee.
Four Emus (including N64) & Flash on Eee PC
A list of games that run quite well on the Eee PC(included: Halo 1, GTA 2, GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas, Half Life 2: Episode 2)
Halo 1 being played on Eee PC ("overclocked" to 800 MHz, which is actually the native speed of the lowest CPU included in an Eee PC.)

Granted, no mention of Crysis being played on the thing, but "playing games" is not just likely - it's done - a lot.
 
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icurafu said:
I was objecting to the blanket statement that SGX530 is a better GPU. For the purpose of 3dmark, it is not "better" by the terms of the benchmarking tool which concluded that the SGX 535 was massively beaten by the GMA900 even with the SGX using a higher performing CPU, which is enough to defeat the sgx530 > gma950 assumption. We'll have a better idea when optismised Quake3 benchmarks are compared as they both use OpenGL.
I'm about to make a statement that's based off of experience, which is NOT to be confused with a blanket statement.

Fillrate-wise, yes, the GMA900/950 is going to be better at pumping texels to the screen.

But it's NOT fillrate that you're going to be concerning yourself with- for it's not what matters in the long run and hasn't for some years now. It's an important part, but it's not the big thing everyone makes it out to be.

In this day and age, fillrate doesn't mean as much if you're not able to process the texels because you're chundering on transform, clipping, and lighting operations on the polys you're submitting to the fragment pipeline. We won't even get into physics and geometry computation operations for which unified shaders bring to the table. This is a dead-on fact of how things work in the OpenGL and Direct3D pipeline- I know, I worked on drivers in the past, including the forefront of Linux OpenGL support.

This is the reason why GMA's are dog slow over IGPs with Vertex options. The main reason the unified shader IGPs with an otherwise identical performance profile are pasting the older generation is because you can now peel off threads to do Vertex shader operations. There's a reason that the X3500's actually able to play games that would otherwise be using a low-end Radeon or GeForce at minimum right now- that's because the X3xxx series have unified shaders and can allocate 1-3 of them for vertex portion operations.

For Quake3, it's not going to show much because Quake 3 doesn't USE vertex shading or fixed-function TCL operations to avoid dealing with the lack thereof that was at least partly present during that era. Heh... RagePRO's were able to play Quake3:Arena acceptably when it came out. I know, with John Carmack working on the Utah-GLX team ON the RagePRO and other chipsets, we were using betas of Q3:A for verification purposes on the drivers back then. As an aside, because of what I just stated, Quake 3 is NOT going to be a decent metric to compare the GPUs with. PERIOD.

If, for example, you were to try to run, say, Tribes 2 for Linux (if it could even run...) or something like X2, you'd see a differing story. Because these two games rely heavily on Vertex path operations, either as fixed functionality, or as vertex shaders, the GMA9XX series GPUs will be bashed in the head with them and drop to slideshow framerates. Why? Because the CPU is now being asked to do these operations and a lot of them and those aren't designed for that- that's what a shader processor does best.

And, this doesn't even get into the comparisons of how a properly executed tile engine renderer will also avoid doing fill operations where it doesn't need to be done. If you're not overlapping, the higher fillrate will matter. Unfortunately, this is NEVER the case- there's a LOT of overlapped rendering. For each overlap, you push data out to the pixels for each overlapping rendering. If you don't have a means to avoid this, you will need a high fill rate to put the scene's frame to the screen to get high framerates. What if you don't do the overlaps anywhere near as much or not at all? You don't need as high a fill rate to get high framerates. A tile engine is designed to minimize and/or remove most overlapping renders from the fragment path befort them happen. So, again, comparing fill rates isn't going to give you a good picture for which is best.

[ edit ]
As for 3DMark scores... I didn't think we had official ES drivers yet for the 3DMarkES benchmarks, which would be the proper comparison- not to mention it's my understanding they don't even have XP drivers for the SGX series GPUs... Where does one find the overall scores and what each valuation for each sub-test is (which is where you REALLY make comparisons...)? If you can't lead me there, I find it difficult to even begin to accept or discuss your position as it stands.
[ /edit ]

To be sure, there's extra pieces in the GMA9xx series that're not there in the PowerVR- but I think you're going to find that many of them are going to be doable in software on one of the shader threads or in the DSP engine.
 
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chad78 said:
sindbad said:
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the point of this GPU comparison. They're both powerfull enough and the SGX is very powerfull for a handheld. Playing games on the eeepc is unlikely, as it isn't made for that.
Granted, no mention of Crysis being played on the thing, but "playing games" is not just likely - it's done - a lot.


In all fairness, he didn't say games can't be played or weren't played on eeepc - he said it wasn't made for games - and that is true. The eeepc is designed to be a very small notebook computer. The Pandora, on the other hand, is designed specifically to be a handheld gaming computer.

I respect what this thread is trying to do, but I see both sides. There is undoubtedly going to be a lot of crossover in terms of audiences that might consider a Pandora - some may not even intend to play many games at all. So a comparison is fair to make. But the Pandora is also very different and unique, and for the hardcore handheld gaming hobbyists, the Pandora is in a class of its own - eeepc need not apply.
 
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chad78 said:
You know what? I see your point. How about something a lot less detailed, but more to the point. I still think there are reasons to give people comparative info about the systems, so how about this?
Oh my gosh, that's it! That's what I want! Wooo! Thank you so much chad78! :)

Edit: "Native Commerical Games" should be Yes for the Pandora. We've already heard reports of people porting commercial software over.
 
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javaJake said:
Edit: "Native Commerical Games" should be Yes for the Pandora. We've already heard reports of people porting commercial software over.



Still, it should probably be listed as "limited" at best in comparison to the DS/PSP.

btw, Bluetooth and GPS will likely be available on Pandora as an expansion via SDIO.
 
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GunPei2X said:
btw, Bluetooth and GPS will likely be available on Pandora as an expansion via SDIO.
It says "Extra Purchase" for both of those now. And "Limited" for commercial games on Pandora.
 
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javaJake said:
chad78 said:
You know what? I see your point. How about something a lot less detailed, but more to the point. I still think there are reasons to give people comparative info about the systems, so how about this?
Oh my gosh, that's it! That's what I want! Wooo! Thank you so much chad78! :)

Edit: "Native Commerical Games" should be Yes for the Pandora. We've already heard reports of people porting commercial software over.


Link and it is changed.
 
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AireTamStorm said:
Link and it is changed.
Making things difficult are we? ;)

No, this is smart. I can't find it now, which probably means the developer was only hinting at it or something. It'll probably pop up in a month if it was real.
 
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javaJake said:
AireTamStorm said:
Link and it is changed.
Making things difficult are we? ;)

No, this is smart. I can't find it now, which probably means the developer was only hinting at it or something. It'll probably pop up in a month if it was real.


It is. Having a source for each spec makes it easy to find out more about each device, and means that information isn't easily contested. OF course, a lot of sites on there CAN be contested with relative ease (3rd party, bad translations, etc), but that is what will make this a more reliable and accurate source for comparisons than most one-sided claims with a message behind them. I started this with the clear stance of "Pandora > All" (Guilty!), but I'll tell you, it looks a ton better now that it is more neutral.

We need to finish the GP2X and PSP specifications. Please post and / or PM me if you have the information to complete those columns.
 
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GunPei2X said:
javaJake said:
Edit: "Native Commerical Games" should be Yes for the Pandora. We've already heard reports of people porting commercial software over.



Still, it should probably be listed as "limited" at best in comparison to the DS/PSP.


Yes. While it's going to be dead-cool stuff in the large, it's going to be limited in quantity at first when compared to either of the handhelds that are "in the same class". Set reasonable expectations and then blow their freakin' minds with what we WILL have... ;)

Moreover, you're going to have some issues with studios and publishers coming forward with stuff- currently, the devices are a hardware platform to run on, but they're also provide some semblance of DRM, ostensibly making it "more difficult" to pirate their stuff (I know guys, work with me here...). We aren't going to provide that same warm fuzzy feeling, never mind that it was a delusion on their part to begin with.
 
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I apologize if this was already covered and I missed it. But I'm a happy modded PSP owner (I love it) and yet it's given credit for 2 items that I will probably get the Pandora for.

1. TV Out - Is definitely limited. Gaming only goes out at 480x224 on progressive screens only. So regular TV's are SOL - and if you output to an HDTV, you get bad letterboxing while using a fraction of the screen. Some homebrew has overcome this, but still - it's very limited.

2. Media Player - Is also limited. Even with mod firmware, there's no firmware that will allow the most common downloaded content - AVI's. Everything has to be converted to MP4 & mp3. The Pandora's media player as confirmed by Squidge will even play AVI/DIVX with AC3 audio.
 
PolloLoco said:
I apologize if this was already covered and I missed it. But I'm a happy modded PSP owner (I love it) and yet it's given credit for 2 items that I will probably get the Pandora for.

1. TV Out - Is definitely limited. Gaming only goes out at 480x224 on progressive screens only. So regular TV's are SOL - and if you output to an HDTV, you get bad letterboxing while using a fraction of the screen. Some homebrew has overcome this, but still - it's very limited.

2. Media Player - Is also limited. Even with mod firmware, there's no firmware that will allow the most common downloaded content - AVI's. Everything has to be converted to MP4 & mp3. The Pandora's media player as confirmed by Squidge will even play AVI/DIVX with AC3 audio.
The PSP can still hand out a progressive signal. My PSP (on component cables) fills my whole HDTV screen. I get letterboxing in games, but not in movies.

AVI is but a mere encapsulation method, as is MP4. I suppose the conversion has something to do with the video decoder chip onboard, and I'm not sure theres anything developers can do about it.

We will add a audio / video codec and supported resolution chart as we complete the other areas of the document.
 
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AireTamStorm said:
PolloLoco said:
I apologize if this was already covered and I missed it. But I'm a happy modded PSP owner (I love it) and yet it's given credit for 2 items that I will probably get the Pandora for.

1. TV Out - Is definitely limited. Gaming only goes out at 480x224 on progressive screens only. So regular TV's are SOL - and if you output to an HDTV, you get bad letterboxing while using a fraction of the screen. Some homebrew has overcome this, but still - it's very limited.

2. Media Player - Is also limited. Even with mod firmware, there's no firmware that will allow the most common downloaded content - AVI's. Everything has to be converted to MP4 & mp3. The Pandora's media player as confirmed by Squidge will even play AVI/DIVX with AC3 audio.
The PSP can still hand out a progressive signal. My PSP (on component cables) fills my whole HDTV screen. I get letterboxing in games, but not in movies.

AVI is but a mere encapsulation method, as is MP4. I suppose the conversion has something to do with the video decoder chip onboard, and I'm not sure theres anything developers can do about it.

We will add a audio / video codec and supported resolution chart as we complete the other areas of the document.


I still believe both of my arguments are valid.

1) Both systems are primarily gaming systems. The PSP has that tv out deficiency for gaming. It's a progressive signal that can't fill out a screen.

2) You agree that the PSP might be hamstrung in handling certain containers. Sadly, homebrewers trying to get the PSP to play other containers have failed miserably. I have a huge collection of movies on avi and divx. I don't use the PSP for pmp usage purely because I have no intention of converting all of my videos.

Because those deficiencies exist, and they're enough to consider my purchase of a Pandora - I believe they should be included in the spreadsheet.
 
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I feel that the thread's title should be changed to reflect the chart's scope as it has become much more than Pandora VS EEE PC.

Here are a few things someone could maybe add :)

Specifications [PSP Slim][Video Outputs]
There's a plugin for the PSP slim (FuSa) that allows TV output using the composite cable with games, but it has limited compatibility. Requires custom firmware obviously.
Source: ps2dev.org forum

Specifications [PSP Slim][WiFi]
The PSP's WiFi chip is 802.11b, not 802.11b/g.
Source: Wikipedia - Playstation Portable

Features & Benefits [DS lite][Emulation Availability]
The DS has a Neo Geo AES/MVS emulator (NeoDS) that can play some games, but with slowdown sometimes. (an amazing piece of work)
Sources: Official Web site
Discussion thread with compatibility reports
 
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