GXMark Is by far the coolest thing ever.

by **Digby** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 7:06am

Unbelievable.

The reason for the current crop of graphics chips in Pocket PCs is to save CPU cycles in order to reduce the overall power consumption of the device. These chips use far less power to read/write pixels than the ARM core does. They aren't designed to be accelerators. They typically have a narrow bus to system memory but fast access to display RAM. This is why your full screen blit using GAPI is going to suffer on these devices.

BTW, MediaQ was acquired by Nvidia about a month or so ago. You'll have to take up your beef with them from now on.

Oh, and the is named "Rumsfeld" not "Runsfeld".

by **fzammetti** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 1:31pm

Oh, come on, leave me alone for typos at 1 in the morning. I think you can safely assume I know the man's name and just fat-fingered it.

I understand WHY the chips are there. I understand why they are a good thing, from one point of view.

It is an undeniable fact however that devices that use them have worse graphics performance in terms of GAPI-based applications, and that is sad. Any time technologies gets worse in new devices is sad.

You can argue that you gain a lot in other areas, and I wouldn't disagree. But from the perspective of writing games for it, the MediaQ chip has proven to not be a good thing. Maybe nVidia (which you didn't capitalize properly by the way, but I won't say anything about it) will decide that they can pull off both tricks, and life will be grand. We'll see.

For now, devices based on the MediaQ chip are out-performed by my 3 year-old Casio E-125 using a 150MHZ MIPS processor and no GPU when it comes to almost any GAPI-based application. Sure, I can run my Axim for longer at a lower frame rate, but for games, the frame rate of the E-125 is preferable. That's all I'm saying.

by **Digby** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 4:46pm

Hey don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree that chips like the MediaQ don't make it easy to write games using GAPI. You should realize though that the makers of the device know this, and yet they have chosen to increase battery life over game performance.

Would I have liked the Axims to have the same performance as the Asus device? Sure! Apparently for a lot of Axim users though, this didn't keep them from buying the device.

Until gaming performance becomes more of a factor in the decision made by consumers shopping for a new PDA, I don't see this changing soon.

BTW, neither of us capitalized NVIDIA properly. It's all uppercase text. More

by **fzammetti** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 4:55pm

Hmm, interesting about NVIDIA. Actually, going to their site, it looks like the n is still a lower-case n, just a slightly funky one. True, the rest are all capitalized though.

I guess we're STILL both wrong in a sense

It's accurate I think to say that the driving force behind PocketPC sales has always been and still is the business market. That's where the manufacturers realize the greatest profits, or expect to anyway, and so their focus is in that arena. Battery life beats out game performance in that case, so MediaQ and it's ilk make perfect sense.

This is probably also the biggest reason we haven't seen a DirectX port yet. It's size is of course an issue on a portable device, but I think they could manage that if they wanted to. It's just not seen as a necassery step when, as you said, gaming performance isn't the top of anyone's list.

I bought the Axim myself as well, but I'm not a big gamer anyway. If I played more than Monopoly (which plays far better on the Axim than my Casio) and ICBM, I'd be quite unhappy right now (although someone could argue that I would have and should have known better if I was a gamer, but I digress).

by **StephC** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 5:02pm

by **Guest** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 5:31pm

by **Digby** » Sep 12, 2003 @ 7:36pm

You'll probably see that sort of thing in the future. Right now there is no API available for game developers to take advantage of the hardware features that would be exposed by such a chip.

Until MS gets off their duff and gets DDraw and maybe D3D available in their Pocket PC SDK, there's no point in putting the hardware in there unless it saves power or speeds up some rudimentary GDI drawing operations.

by **Presto** » Sep 17, 2003 @ 12:55am

by **WrathS** » Sep 17, 2003 @ 1:48am

by **hikari** » Sep 17, 2003 @ 1:33pm

Cool program.

My Ipaq 5550 got 911.

by **tomdon** » Sep 17, 2003 @ 2:53pm

My Asus A620 got this :

by **WrathS** » Sep 17, 2003 @ 7:26pm

HOLY CRAP.

GXMark Is by far the coolest thing ever.

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