Pandora Question About Sdl On Pandora

[Eniko]

When you use SDL on a Pandora, is the difference between software and hardware graphical operations the same as it would be on a PC? E.g. will using SDL blit operations be (a lot) slower than drawing quads through OpenGL because one is done in software and the other is done on hardware?

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I'm more of a software girl than hardware, so I'm not quite sure how this would present on an entirely different system.

 

[dekutree64]

Yeah, probably using OpenGL would be the fastest way to draw things. But Pandora has a pretty beefy CPU and not too high screen resolution, so it would be pretty tough to slow it down with a 2D game either way.

I'll probably just write my own blit functions, and only use SDL to dump the completed back buffer to the screen Easy and fun, since I don't like messing around with APIs more than I have to.

 

[Sphinxter]

Reinventing the wheel is good for you.

 

[yosh64]

hey

dekutree64: That's pretty much what I do in my 2D graphics/game lib, I just get hold of the pointer to the pixels of the framebuffer and blit everything myself.

But yea, it's more fun if you like graphics programming, you learn more, and makes your code more portable as you could easily use some other interface to the framebuffer or whatever.

cyas

 

[Pickle]

When you use SDL on a Pandora, is the difference between software and hardware graphical operations the same as it would be on a PC? E.g. will using SDL blit operations be (a lot) slower than drawing quads through OpenGL because one is done in software and the other is done on hardware?

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I'm more of a software girl than hardware, so I'm not quite sure how this would present on an entirely different system.

There is the hw to do 2d acceleration which will be used by SDL. Its not going to all be sw driven. Even the GP2X has hw to support 2d acceleration.