Graphics acceleration: building a list

[slitchfield]

Can you help me? I'm preparing a feature on graphics acceleration in S60 phones and am trying to build up a list of advantages and (specifically) software that only runs well (or at all) on devices with graphics acceleration. Read on if you can help...

Read on in the full article.

[srw985]

Pretty sure the Samsung i8510 is accellerated.

[slitchfield]

You're right, it is, I've just checked and Oval Racer runs at full speed on it 8-) Anyway, back to software and features.....?

N93i

global race

[Kazutoyo]

Quake 1, 2 and 3 has been ported to S60. Quake 3 lack any kind of software rendering and will only run if one got the hardware for it.

The S60 phones with MBX hardware (or MBX Lite) are N82, N93, N95, N95 8GB, E90, Samsung i550, Samsung i7710 and Samsung i8510.

The Nokia phones use OMAP 2420 and the Samsung phones OMAP 2430.

The N96 got some 3D hardware too, using the STn8815 chip, but unfortunately it seems to be incompatible with OpenGL ES 1.x or something, cause S60 seems to be unable to use it properly.

EDIT: Just stumbled upon this article, it's about an app recently released for the iPhone but is related to graphic acceleration.

The N95 used hardware acceleration for the multimedia menu. HW acceleration allowed it to apply effects to images used as the background whilst maintaining smooth scrolling. Compare this to the basic multimedia menu now used in newer Nokia devices and the difference is clear.

Also, the better Quake ports can't be played on phones that don't have HW acceleration.

I look forward to your article, Steve. Something to shut up those people who say 3D hardware is useless.

Suggest you call the folks at Imagination Technologies / PowerVR. Perhaps you should go to Kings Langley and pay them a visit, try Dave Harold for more details....

The POWERVR SGX™ graphics IP core family provides a powerful and flexible solution for all forms of next-generation embedded multimedia processing, including 3D, 2D and vector graphics, advanced anti-aliasing and image processing. POWERVR SGX has been adopted by the market leaders for the next generation of SoC application processors.

POWERVR MBX™ is the de facto standard for mobile 3D, 2D and vector graphics acceleration and is being used today by the majority of leading semiconductor companies for their mobile graphics solutions. It has been deployed in over 100 products, with over 100 million units shipped.

[slitchfield]

Anyone know if the raw video recording in the cameras on these models is also aided by graphics acceleration? Or is this something encoded within the camera electronics?

[elaverick]

Originally Posted by slitchfield

Anyone know if the raw video recording in the cameras on these models is also aided by graphics acceleration? Or is this something encoded within the camera electronics?

Having had a quick flick through the OpenGL ES specs I'm pretty sure there's no real provision for that kind of processing. OpenGL accellerates because its a state machine, since you can't keep state information between frames without vector data I don't think it can work. The only thing I can think is it might benefit from fast writes into the graphics memory, but that would be very platform independant.

http://www.khronos.org/registry/gles...pec.1.1.12.pdf

Not necessarily by the PowerVR graphics accelerator but the camera images might benefit from the DSP and imaging and video accelerator of the OMAP2420 that those phones come with.

This games runs extremely well with graphic acceleration like N95, but is choppy on N85.

[m80116]

I do think that 3D acceleration and video acceleration are two different things.

Devices like Nokia N95 should have both. OpenGL acceleration chip (for which you can run OpenGL graphics) and what I suppose to be a different thing: video acceleration chip. If you use a program like Y-Tasks Trace to track CPU Time usage you can spot that while playing .MP4 files (MPEG-4 or AVC) the CPU usage usually keeps following the flat bottom end graph line, meaning to me that the CPU has been freed from cycles then charged onto the video acceleration chip.

I don't have though any official documents tu support this, it's just my presumption based on analystic work on my device.

[blue13x]

-The System Rush evolution demo included with the N95 (not the Ngage version, the Demo)

-The Nokia E3 demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUOqR_2sACk