Toshiba e310 performance problem

[Johan]

I have a couple of benchmarks.

Download GapiDraw (www.gapidraw.com). Copy the contents from the following folders to the PDA:

samples\MFC\WinCE\ARMRel\
samples\Simple\WinCE\ARMRel

[MFC Sample]
This sample tests a combination of small blits and non-sequential memory reads. This will grind to a halt on XScale processors.

Performance on an IPAQ 3630:
Landscape: 175 sprites
Portrait: 130 sprites

Performance on an Toshiba E740:
Landscape: 50 sprites
Portrait: 100 sprites

[Simple]
This demo copies and rotates a large bitmap to the display. The copy is done in a cache-optimized way.

Performance on an IPAQ 3630:
Landscape: 23 ms / frame
Portrait: 23 ms / frame

Performance on an Toshiba E740:
Landscape: 30 ms / frame
Portrait: 30 ms / frame

Try these on the 310 and post the results...

/Johan

[Mr.Prayer]

[MFC Sample]
Landscape: 50 sprites
Portrait: 70 sprites

[Simple]
Landscape: 40 ms / frame
Portrait: 40 ms / frame

[Johan]

Wow! This has to be the worst performing PDA ever..

I wonder how they test their new PDAs.. "Ok, we can start it up and the calendar works.. Lets sell it and make some money"

My guess with the 310 is that the memory bus is slow, resulting in a serious impact on all applications (and not only memory reads as is the case with the 740). This could probably be evaluated in more detail, but with performance like this it's of little use.

It seems like the 310 Pocket PC is simply not a device suitable for games.

[Mr.Prayer]

I've tried Pocket Rayman on e310.
It works quite fine.

[Johan]

That's basically not the point.

Sure, you can pick many games that work fine on the 310. Games like Rayman with an effective screen area of 240x240 with a limited number of on-screen sprites will work very well. I bet that the Solitaire game works equally as well.

You WILL however experience issues with more demanding games. As you saw in the MFC sample, you can run up to 70 sprites without a problem. It's not too common for a game to have 70 sprites on screen at the same time. But once a game is designed for 100 sprites (or multilayered tiled backgrounds etc) it may not work properly on your PDA.

Usually game developers design their game for the slowest PDA on the market. If MIPS is to be supported, the game is designed to work on MIPS PDAs. This means that faster PDAs only take advantage of a fraction of their potential.

[Mr.Prayer]

But i have problems even with 2 sprites drawing on e310.
Its very slow. 2 times slower than on iPAQ.

[Kzinti]

[Hosed]