Will you consider an upgrade to the graphics chip on the Pyra board?


ObiKKa

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I was commenting at a blog by Gonetz, the author of both Glide64 and GLideN64 graphics plugins for the N64 emulators. I was wondering if he or somebody else could port his GLideN64 plugin to the Pyra system but with full support included assuming there is support for GL ES 3.0 or 3.1 API. He's said that for mobile devices that support only GL ES 2 he's had to truncate or cut off some features from his latest plugin to get it working on them.

So I'm wondering if the team will add driver support in the Pyra for GL ES 3 or 3.1. Else wouldn't they consider an upgrade to a newer PowerVR chip at just the next step up from series 6-- onwards?

This is the comment I made over at Gonetz's blog:

"Nice! Hope someone can port your plugin (and Mupen64Plus AE) to the new Pyra handheld device once it's out. But it probably won't support GL ES 3.0/3.1 unfortunately as I realised by looking this up after checking the Pyra's specs page: http://www.notebookcheck.net/PowerVR-SGX544MP2.125344.0.html.

It says that it only supports DX 9.3 and GL ES 2.0. Oh no. So does that mean that your full plugin package won't be supported, but instead be truncated for that platform?

However this one: http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/the-powervr-sgx544mp-a-modern-gpu-for-todays-leading-platforms
says: "Thanks to the PowerVR architecture, SGX544 is capable of exceeding both OpenGL ES 2.0 and DirectX9_3 requirements, making it ideal for tablets, computing devices and smartphones."
"Not only that, but we have recently pushed the boundary for all existing PowerVR Series5XT GPUs with a new series of API extensions which include OpenGL ES 3.0 features like MRTs, occlusion queries, seamless cube maps, sampler access from vertex shaders, floating point textures, GLSL full-precision floating point, R and RG textures, min/max blends, and multisample render buffers."
Is it possible for the Pandora/Pyra team to add in graphics drivers for Pyra to support GL ES 3 and 3.1?

However they could have instead upgraded to the next step up as the PowerVR series 6-- and above do support GL ES 3.1! Perhaps you could offer advice to the Pandora team about this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR"

Your thoughts?
 

WizardStan

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SoCs do not work that way. The whole thing is a complete package, what the company puts in the chip is what you get. The only way to change the GPU is to use a different SoC and ED already investigated all the options. We get what we get and that's final.
 

rohezal

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Maybe in the future there will be a new CPU board. With a newer CPU / gpu combination. This is the good thing about the pyra. You can upgrade it :)
 

Glyph Reader

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Ptitseb has already ported the thing to OpenGLES 2.0 It's just very slow on the Pandora and not public ;)
This is good to hear.  Does Ptitseb have any idea how well it runs on the Devboard? 

-Glyph Reader
 

ObiKKa

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Maybe in the future there will be a new CPU board. With a newer CPU / gpu combination. This is the good thing about the pyra. You can upgrade it :)
This is exactly what I was thinking. I was sure that it'd be possible for ED and co. to make newer iterations using the same outer Pyra enclosure, LCD screen and cables just like the older Pandora iterations from the classic model, to 600 MHz variant and finally at the 1GHz model.
 

Binky

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The pyra has the SOC (and a couple of other things) on one board, and all the peripherals (keyboard, nubs, SDXC slots, wlan, audio stuff, 3G chip, battery management, external conectors) on another.

This should make processor upgrades easier and cheaper than with the pandora
 

_jr_

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While I agree we shouldn't expect too much. It is not guaranteed that suitable SOCs (more powerful with similar thermal characteristics and similar interfaces) will be available. It was difficult enough to find a SOC when developing from scratch.
 

FaeMinx

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I'm absolutely positive that sometime down the line, we will make a new cpu board with a soc orders of magnitude more powerful than the 1ghz was to the 600mhz Pandora.


In fact, I see this happening again and again until we find that our ports are virtually obsolete and in the many years and iterations of the Pyra...


Find that there are new input options and technologies we want integrated.


And yes... a new keyboard layout.
 

Binky

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How about the Pyra 2π ?

and then Pyra 0 ?

Degrees and 1-based indexing are boring :p
 

Natsu

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Well, we still have the Allwinner a80, if there's a sudden mind change.
 
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