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I think I'm getting better now - Printable Version

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I think I'm getting better now - Brian Beuken - 09-20-2020

I suspect my desire to own every SBC has finally been sated. The Pi4, is the last one I bought though I did get a 2Gb and a 4Gb, I don't quite seen the need for an 8G for what I do.
ie, GPU based games development. The 2Gb I am testing as a passive cooled system to see how far I can push it.. though its a nice metal case cooler so pretty effective.



I've taken a little bit of time in the last weeks to review many of my older SBC's and find it sad so few have progressed in their OS's or their Drivers.. Even the mighty Odroid's are lagging behind, the XU4 and C2's still being the onlys one to have anything like proper support for the GPU, and XU4 still, outperforms the new RPi 4's.  But their later boards just don't seem to have the support yet.

Orange and Banana keep chucking out boards every few months but no support other than the admirable efforts of Armbian. But for Armbian, GPU support is not a priority. the kickstarter based Friets are painfully underwhelming, FriendlyArm's little boards are a delight but support is mixed, though I do like my little neo4, and the newer Odroids, as I say, just don't cut it. The last 2 or 3 units like the N2,I have bought have been remarkably powerful boards on paper,  but no GPU support to really make them stand above the crowd or their XU4 sibling. The Vim's... sigh.... so much potential...


So for me the journey is pretty much done, I'm not seeking any more boards for a while unless I am assured they have GPU support as standard, I don't build my own OS's. I'm going to focus only on my Nvidia Jetson, which blows every board away on GPU power, and Raspberry Pi4  for general everyday use. Though its OpenGL 3.1 and 3.2 support isn't there yet, I'm prettty sure will  be in time.

Im putting together some new tutorials for these systems, to fully demonstrate OpenGL3.0+ and hopefully I'll start to show the results in a few months.


RE: I think I'm getting better now - jomoengineer - 09-22-2020

Hey Brian,

Yeah, I can feel your pain. You have done a nice job of going through a good number of boards and have done what you could to point out the pros and cons.  It certainly is a good reference.

Considering Eben and gang intended the Raspberry Pi as a Game dev system, it would seem a good bet to sick with that.  The NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a nice board but more than double the price of the Pi; it seems worth it though. Plus, the Nano has Vulkan support and it seems the Pi will have it as well sometime in the near future. This seems to be the direction folks are moving in the Game and Graphics world.

I still have not bought the eMMC card for the ODROID C4 I have so it has sat collecting dust.  This is sort of an issue I have with the ODROID boards, in that you need to buy extra stuff just to use it which drives up the cost of the board. Plus, as you mentioned, the XU4 seems to be one with the most support and is referenced, via the XU3,  on the ARM Graphics and Gaming Development Development Platforms page. I guess outside of the $200++ boards like the HiKey boards, the Xu4 is a good option for ARM game dev.

The other board I have been playing with is the Beaglebone Black with a PowerVR GPU SGX530 but it only supports OpenGL ES 2.x; no 3.0.  It does not have the support that the Pi has so there is a lot of manual stuff to do to get it to work properly.
I did get nice graphics results from following this page:
https://elinux.org/BeagleBoneBlack/SGX_%2B_Qt_EGLFS_%2B_Weston


Although shamefully I still have not completed your book, I look forward to your new examples.

Cheers.

Jon


RE: I think I'm getting better now - Brian Beuken - 09-22-2020

Ah keep at it mate, you'll get to it, mastering graphics and games is a long journey and one you need to take are your own pace Big Grin