PocketMatrix

I just bought a new Dell Axim with a 300 Mhz XScale CPU. I like it and I think it was a sweet deal at $200 (from Dell's website). From what I've read places online, though, the XScale processors don't play well with the PPC2002 platform and performance suffers. I'm able to get around 40 FPS on the blit sample, which has been enough power to write a nice game. Do the 200Mhz StrongARM devices do better than this? (Posts of games running at 50 or 70 fps indicates they might) How about the older 150Mhz versions? My real interest is to get a feel for which devices are going to be able to play my game well. If FPS scales linearly with processor speed (pretty sure it has more to do with memory latency and bandwidth) a game running at 40 fps on my device will be close to unplayable on an older 150Mhz machine.

Also, I noticed in the PocketFrog code that the display initialization code is model dependant in places. Could PF performance be improved by adding some specific initialization for XScale devices? As I understand it, there is potential performance gain that can be achieved by matching certain graphics operations with the internal orientation of the PPC's video buffer. Or maybe I'm completely wrong there. I was just wondering.

There's a version of Blit with sound? Is this the sample in pocket frog plus? I just got it today, but haven't looked in it very much. Wouldn't it be much better for the sound routines in PFP to be in their own library? It would make it much easier to keep PF and the sound lib in PFP both up to date as developement continues separately on each package. Any, I'm digressing a little bit.

I get 40 fps on the Blit sample without sound. What, if anything, can I do about it without writing XScale-specific code? Might it be that PF is using the wrong internal video buffer alignment? (I somewhere got the impression that it tries to match its video buffers with that of the hardware its running on) If so, that would be an easy fix. Maybe it's just wishful thinking...

Which begs the next question. Why does XScale suck and what the hell was Intel thinking? It's not an improvement at all. It's worse than the older processors.

Xscales dont "suck". They extend battery life. The whole big thing is everyone thinks MHZ's are the end all of performance. This is not true all.

PDA's are not designed for gaming performance. While I wish they were, they are geared more towards buisness apps.