Will coders have access to the DSP and the PowerVR SGX?

[Charbax]

My understanding is that all the DSP codecs are proprietary to Texas Instruments or some subsidiary to Texas Instruments, that any hardware that wants access to those have to pay a licence for each device, prove that they have a secure system to purchase those codecs, in the same way that Archos has codec plugins.

That is, unless you plan to do all codecs on the ARM only, but then, what's the DSP going to be used for?

I wonder, does the Neon PowerVR SGX graphics accelerator have similar proprietary technology to it? Would N64 and eventual Dreamcast be the only type of emulation that would require using the SGX to speed things up?

Which are like the top-5 OpenGL Linux 3D games which you think would be coolest when/if ported to use the PowerVR SGX?

Anyone think Google Earth, Blender or some other open source 3D graphics projects would make sense in using them with the PowerVR SGX?

 

[AireTamStorm]

There is a DSP Developer Toolkit for Linux and Open Source projects:
https://www-a.ti.com/downloads/sds_support/targetcontent/LinuxDspTools/download.html
And SGX access can be done via OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0:
http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/index.asp#GLES2

The SGX driver is a binary blob, much like the nVIDIA drivers for Linux.

 

[laxer3a]

The link you gave from Imagination Technologies gives only the EMULATION SDK for PC on Win32 and linux.

I do not think it provides the EGL / GL-ES 2.0 libraries for OMAP platform !

So... how can we get those libraries ?
They are definitely not opensource and only licensee from Imagination can get access to them (so TI got those probably...)

Regards,
Laxer3A

 

[pvtSuhov]

What the status of OpenGL ES 2.0 drivers? I've heard the once for linux not yet released. Is it true?

 

[Exophase]

Hey laxer3a - you're one of the SNES9x TYL programmers right? Welcome to the Pandora boards *_*

OpenGL ES 2.0 drivers are definitely on the plate, and there are drivers in some form/capacity that do exist right now. This is known because there are demonstration of 3D on Beagle Board. Exactly what Pandora will ship with or be available with (how fully featured or stable available drivers will be) is unknown, but it's more of a when than an if.

 

[laxer3a]

Hi exophase, yes indeed, I am ;-) So... Am I that famous ?
(and... I think I have seen you on ps2dev isn't it ?)

To come back to the subject, I do know that those drivers exist, because...
well, we do have TI Omap board at work and probably with those working drivers ! (Never touched it personnally, but my coworker did used shaders on an omap board)

But this is stuff for my job, under NDA and so on, etc...etc...
Do not even think that I would look for those files at work.
(I do not want any trouble with my current company)

So I am wondering, in this project, with which route they can get those drivers/libraries ? I have learned about Pandora just a few days ago...
So I do not know much about many many things on this platform.
By buying chips from TI, do TI gives the right for the devellopers to get those ?

I still got no clear answers, but I really want to use shader on that hardware.

Now when it comes to available drivers, there is also the OpenGL 1.1 drivers.
So seeing 3D does not mean that it is openGLES 2.0

If possible I would really like to have a definite official answer from people really involved with this project.

Regards,
Laxer3A

 

[Exophase]

People have used the drivers on the Beagle Board, which is freely available hardware that anyone can buy right now. So as far as I'm aware the drivers themselves can be obtained by anyone. TI has always marketed the OMAP35xx series as having OpenGL ES 2 support in hardware, so I think it would be rather dishonest if you had to pay extra to use this. It might be a little strange for the drivers not to be available in general (although not unheard of).

Yeah I was active in PSP emulation development >_> I hope we can get you on board for Pandora dev. ;D

 

[parox]

I've ordered a pandora so I might as well try and contribute.

According to this quote:

OpenGL ES 2.0, publicly released in March 2007[1], eliminates most of the fixed-function rendering pipeline in favor of a programmable one. Almost all rendering features of the transform and lighting pipelines, such as the specification of materials and light parameters formerly specified by the fixed-function API, are replaced by shaders written by the graphics programmer. As a result, OpenGL ES 2.0 is not backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_ES OpenGL ES 2.0 is not backwards compatible with 1.1. Since it uses shaders I'd assume that the driver would need to write custom shaders to implement all the fixed function shaders and functionality that existed in 1.1. If that is the case that may be the hold up. Or I could be totally wrong, but I assume that is how drivers work for the unified shader cards on PCs, if a fixed function api like Direct X 8 calls the driver, the driver converts those fixed function calls into set shader programs which are then run on the card.

Or am I getting 'shaders' confused with more capable pixel and vertex shaders in the PC world?

I'm not sure how 'thick' embedded drivers are, but if what I was saying above it would mean that any 3D program that runs on the iPhone for example would need to have some serious work done to it, to convert all the fixed function OpenGL ES calls to shader programs.

I hope this has been of some help, or I'm totally wrong.

 

[laxer3a]

Hi,

yes, we do know that 1.1 and 2.0 are not compatible.
But this is not what I was saying.

What I was saying is that you can get the omap OGL 1.1 driver from ImgTech web site but not the 2.0
So, from where do I get/download the 2.0 library... ?

Regards.

 

[parox]

I just read the thread about reverse engineering the SGX, and lets just say that I'm very glad there are a lot of pandora owners who know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than I do. :lol: