Wiz Or Caanoo

[Lordus]

As you might be talking about me, yes i can confirm that.

I tested my own emulator, same build, pollux clock settings manually set to identical values on Caanoo and Wiz and benchmarked for top speed. The Caanoo was generally about 10% slower.
Timing was done with hardware timers in both cases.

Of course that doesn't mean that emulators or other software will generally run slower on the Caanoo, as there are a lot of factors, and the firmware settings for bus speed etc. also differ.
The fact that emulators dont need to rotate the screen on the Caanoo is a plus, for example, and will most likely make up for the slower RAM.

Just tested the newest Picodrive for fun on the latest firmwares on Wiz and Caanoo, with the exact same settings, tearing fix off, frame limiter off etc. and it also runs up to 10% faster on the Wiz.

Thanks for the reply Lordus, this was, what I asked for, someone saying, I made these benchmarks and I can confirm the 10%. Interesting anyway. Just out of interest, which emulators did you test, you mention you own emulator and Picodrive, what is your emulator on the Caanoo?

I ask, because Exophase said:

I heard benchmark results from which I derived 10%. I'm not disclosing who benchmarked what because I don't know if he's comfortable with me doing so, but it was for several emulators, so pretty representative of the kind of thing people will run on the platform.

From that I got the impression somebody benched a variety of programs emulating different platforms on the Wiz and Caanoo.

I did the tests with 2 different programs, emulating 4 different platforms. They are not publicly available.

 

[Exophase]

About the speed. Strange. And cool!
I tested my own released and unreleased stuff (demo effects, led blur, creep tea, 3d engine tests) compared to wiz, both at 533Mhz.
The Caanoo makes some 30% better in all of them.
E.g. try led blur, first screen with stars 100fps in Caanoo, 70fps in Wiz. It's about 30% difference all the way till the end.
Plasma was 172fps on Wiz, 250fps in Caanoo!

Then today I woke up and noticed: Plasma 220. First screen on Led blur 80. Darn! I just updated with the new 1.50 firmware. At least, it's still a bit faster than the Wiz.

I don't know, everyone says the Caanoo is slower but my tests shows an improvement even. Although it could be different with emulators, more complex code, more cache consuming stuff. I remember when I moved from GP2X to the Wiz and my tests were 2x-3x faster, but that didn't happened with the released emulators from other people. Strange.

I might release a small benchmark soon.

If you see things are faster on the Caanoo then it probably means you're doing soft-rotation in 240x320 mode and don't realize it (can happen behind your back in SDL depending on the firmware). That's the only really viable explanation.

 

[CKeichel]

I did the tests with 2 different programs, emulating 4 different platforms. They are not publicly available.

Any chance of making them public, cause the significance of non public benchmarks is limited. It is very hard to comprehend the results, if key factors like what systens were benchmarked, which games were benchmarked and what results were achieved aren't open. This is much more the case, when these non-public benchmark results are used as arguments in discussions.
This doesn't mean, I don't believe your results, if you say, you measured this difference between the Wiz and the Cannoo, then you will be right, but no one else can verify the results.

 

[Jengo]

hardware is tricky business...

 

[dreik]

probably means you're doing soft-rotation in 240x320 mode and don't realize it

what is soft-rotation?

 

[Exophase]

what is soft-rotation?

Means there's code somewhere rotating the whole screen from 320x240 to 240x320.

 

[dreik]

what is soft-rotation?

Means there's code somewhere rotating the whole screen from 320x240 to 240x320.

And what do you gain from something like that? I mean why a developer uses soft-rotation? Isn't the image heavily distorted?

 

[Exophase]

And what do you gain from something like that? I mean why a developer uses soft-rotation? Isn't the image heavily distorted?

Wiz's display is 240x320 oriented on its side. Few programs naturally render for things oriented on their sides, so the framebuffer has to be rotated so it appears to be 320x240. There's a hardware 320x240 mode where the screen does the rotation, but it isn't buffered and therefore results in diagonal tearing due to updating against the refresh position.

 

[SNESFAN]

;; nevermind, stupid question

 

[redlemon]

I'm also trying to decide between a wiz or caanoo. What's people's opinion on the durability of the two consoles? I'd ideally like something to last a good few years since I'm a student. I'm pretty clusmy so it's likely to get a few knocks too.

 

[Popcorn Dave]

I only have the Caanoo so I can't compare directly, but the build quality is very good and solid. I dunno about long term since both consoles are fairly new but I've heard the Wiz isn't as quite as well-made (buttons wobble around and stuff like that). Looks like the Wiz would be less comfortable to hold as well. Have you looked at the Dingoo as well? I hear they're a bit flimsy, but you can pick them up on eBay for a cool $40-50 or so, if money is a factor.

 

[redlemon]

I've looked at the dingoo but I believe you need windows xp to install dingux. I already have a Supercard DSTWO which will probably get most of the native emulators for the dingoo since they share the same chip. The main appeal to me of the wiz/caanoo is GINGE and pcsx4all.

 

[Popcorn Dave]

Well, the Caanoo doesn't have PSX4all or GINGE yet and I don't know when they're coming, so you might want to wait a little bit before you splash out, or just get the Wiz.

 

[sirthunder516]

If you're willing to "wait it out" for psx4all, amiga, etc. I recommend the Caanoo. The analog stick is the best mobile analog stick I've used and it is incredibly nice for Doom, Quake, and arcade games with diagonals *except fighting games*. Game boy games with the analog stick are a pain until you get used to it a bit. I own both a Dingoo and a Caanoo and you should NOT get a Dingoo. They are cheap, mine only holds a charge for ~40 hours, and Dingux is very poor. In Dingux, I can't save games in Doom or change supertux keymappings or do a whole load of random stuff because of constant "Segmentation Fault" errors. I can't change the default frontend from Gmenu2x either (not that I would want to, but this blocks me from new frontends or updates). I have very strong feelings for the Dingoo, and they're all bad. I see the Caanoo as having a far better future than the Wiz and the Dingoo in the long run because of the extra RAM, USB port, g-sensor, wifi, and tv-out but if you don't want to wait get a Wiz. Avoid the Dingoo, there's too many fakes and installing Dingux is a hit-or-miss operation no matter what your operating system is. Plus the Gp2x handhelds have twice or four times the RAM of the Dingoo and almost twice the processing power. Hope this helps.

 

[CKeichel]

If you're willing to "wait it out" for psx4all, amiga, etc. I recommend the Caanoo. The analog stick is the best mobile analog stick I've used and it is incredibly nice for Doom, Quake, and arcade games with diagonals *except fighting games*. Game boy games with the analog stick are a pain until you get used to it a bit. I own both a Dingoo and a Caanoo and you should NOT get a Dingoo. They are cheap, mine only holds a charge for ~40 hours, and Dingux is very poor. In Dingux, I can't save games in Doom or change supertux keymappings or do a whole load of random stuff because of constant "Segmentation Fault" errors. I can't change the default frontend from Gmenu2x either (not that I would want to, but this blocks me from new frontends or updates). I have very strong feelings for the Dingoo, and they're all bad. I see the Caanoo as having a far better future than the Wiz and the Dingoo in the long run because of the extra RAM, USB port, g-sensor, wifi, and tv-out but if you don't want to wait get a Wiz. Avoid the Dingoo, there's too many fakes and installing Dingux is a hit-or-miss operation no matter what your operating system is. Plus the Gp2x handhelds have twice or four times the RAM of the Dingoo and almost twice the processing power. Hope this helps.

Don't have any of your problems on my Dingoo. Charge holds up fine, saving in every Dingux program works without any problem. After changing from dmenu to gmenu2x (about 8 months ago) I didn't had a single segmentation fault. Gmenu2x isn't the "default" frontend for Dingux, cause Dingux hasn't any "default" frontend, if you are not satisfied with it, you can always use dmenu.
I don't know, why you say Dingux is "poor", cause it is a full fletched Linux, like the one, that is running on the Caanoo, no difference here.
The Dingoo is a fine machine for it's price, it has a TV-Out cable coming with the device for free, the built in emulators are very good and even without Dingux, you get many additional emulators, that are very mature, for the native firmware. Additionally, the Dingoo has far better video replay capabilities than the Caanoo, cause video encoding is done in hardware, apart from recognizing many different codecs (including real media), the Dingoo can play videos without further recoding, this means, you can give him your (SD)-video file and the device plays it flawlessly (without srt subtitles). The Caanoo on the other side has the worst movie player I've seen in a while.