Quake shown by ATI for new mobile 2300 graphics

[ToTTenTranz]

Pardon me if I'm wrong, but isn't the PowerVR MBX a whole lot more powerfull than the Imageon 2300?


1- It's currently capable of 360MPixels on a tile render engine (which is 100% effective).
2- It is planned to come in a SOC architecture so bandwith between the gpu and the cpu will not be a problem.
3- It has a vertex shader unit that acts as a FPU (four floating-point operations per cicle)
4- The MBX's driver team has been working on drivers for pocket pc 2004 and for Symbian for quite a while now (at least since that interview at Beyond3D).. As well as openGl ES. And is planned to be released in the first WinCE 4.x devices..
5- It will come embedded with the cpus of some PPC2004 devices (both XScale, samsung and OMAP cpus will have it)..

Is the Imageon 2300 supposed to compete with the MBX, or are we talking about two completely different markets?

[ToTTenTranz]

No answer... I wonder if I touched a sensitive spot...

[spiral]

not a sensitive spot, just a dead thread.

[ToTTenTranz]

You're right... weird.. How did I ever even see this 2 month old thread?!

[James S]

And seeing as how neither are actually in any PocketPCs...

[ToTTenTranz]

And seeing as how neither are actually in any PocketPCs...

I don't know about Imageon2300 but the MBX will be in some PPC2k4 devices for sure.
In the beyond3d interview that is like 1 year old they said they were working with microsoft to build drivers for the DirectX version that will come with PPC2k4, and also for OpenGL ES.
Unless they will be launching PPC2k4 SO powered devices that are not pocketpcs.. lol

[Dan East]

I can't comment on any 2300 specs at that level, nor can I compare it to some other chip. ATI played a dominate role in creating the OpenGL ES spec. They even drafted it in the first place. Imagination is clearly playing catch-up in this area, as they only announced at CES 2004 they would have OGLES support later this year, while the 2300 already has complete (and demonstrated) OGLES drivers in place.

Although PowerVR MBX may hit the market first, ATI obviously kept them honest, and prevented Imagination from sliding by and forcing some proprietary 3D api (probably derived from the Dreamcast) on us.

Finally, as I've said before, no XScale PPC can currently make full use of the 2300. It cannot push polys at it fast enough, even with geometry caching. So there isn't much point in the PowerVR MBX being any faster. The rendering takes place in parallel to the CPU anyway, so there would be no net gain. However the bigger issue is pure rendering quality, and driver robustness. ATI at least has Imagination beat with the latter. ATI played a role describing the specs, and thus PowerVR MBX is likely not as well suited for OpenGL ES (or more accurately, OpenGL ES is likely not as well suited for PowerVR MBX). ATI may also have them beat on the former too, but that subjective comparison would have to wait until PowerVR MBX has a real 100% port behind it, like GLQuake (the Tomb Raider that is running on PowerVR MBX is the basterdized PS1 version, so it doesn't count).

Dan East

[ToTTenTranz]

I can't comment on any 2300 specs at that level, nor can I compare it to some other chip. ATI played a dominate role in creating the OpenGL ES spec. They even drafted it in the first place. Imagination is clearly playing catch-up in this area, as they only announced at CES 2004 they would have OGLES support later this year, while the 2300 already has complete (and demonstrated) OGLES drivers in place.

Dan East

It is not my intention to question your knowledge in this area Dan, but according to the interview with the MBX development team, they are also part of the Khronos group:

"Seeing this is OpenGL though I assume you'll be able to utilise your own extensions there?

Absolutely, and that's exactly what we'll be doing so we'll have full support of the capabilities of MBX with OpenGL ES.

So in essence you'll have a superset of the core OpenGL ES?

Yes. We're heavily involved in the Khronos group and we're one of the twelve promoters of the technology."
http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/pvrmbx/index.php?p=3


Also, Imagination has never shown any intention into forcing a 3D proprietary API for the PocketPC. It will use MGL (PowerVR's API that's used since the PVR Series 1) for operating sistems that do not have #native# support for OpenGL ES (linux and symbian). For pocketpc devices (which I think is the matter in question here) it will use exclusively D3D Mobile.


I can't say the same for ATi since they list a so-called "ATI Core Driver - hardware abstraction layer". (correct me if I'm wrong.. I only know what I see in the specs page..)

One thing I notice is that ATi doesn't mention the development of drivers for D3D Mobile anywhere.. Maybe they are claiming that the chip is compatible with the XScale architecture, but they are not intending to implement it for real (if they are only targeting cellphones with 16bit qvga lcds, it would explain the "up to 2Mb" spec).


I'm a big ATi fan. I've been using their desktop graphics cards for over 3 years and I can say I'm not disappointed at all.. But considering that MBX has been in development for nearly 4 years now, my guess is that they are taking a lead here (theoretical performance-wise, of course).

And maybe it's not correct to evaluate the current Xscales as being the bottlenecks for these chips since they aren't planned to come with any current XScale (at least not the PXA255/63).

[Dan East]

I guess I'll make a few comments.

First it is unfortunate and very near-sighted that Imagination is jumping on the D3D bandwagon so heavily. ATI is working on a far grander scheme than that. Most of the devices that will ship with the 2300 later this year do not even have Microsoft operating systems. The cell phone market is completely dominated by everyone <i>but</i> Microsoft. So it makes far, far more sense to concentrate all efforts on a non-MS API for that major reason alone.

According to the article you linked to:
<i>The second reason is that until we receive silicon back we are not really able to open a wide-ranging developer program. We are waiting to get silicon back and in Q3 '03 we'll be rolling out developer systems.</i>

Prior to that they had only demoed on FPGA boards, not actual silicon. The 2300 was already being produced in silicon around the time that interview was conducted. So regardless of how long Imagination has been toiling at this, ATI was actually <i>ahead</i> as far as having a completely finished product <i>and</i> robust, non-platform dependant drivers ready.

ATI is going for ubiquity. It won't require a next generation XScale platform to support the 2300. We'll see the Imageon chip in cell phones truly not worthy of such acelleration (ie Java-only phones even). 2300s will be in devices with TI chipsets, etc (which dominate the current cell phone market). Imagination <i>has</i> to have OpenGL support, because the raw number of 2300's on the market compared to PowerVR MBX would mean developers would lean toward whatever API the former supported, simply because the market is larger. By adding OpenGL support, Imagination is hoping to make it easier for 2300 developers to support their chipset as well, preventing them from being locked out of the development phase on the first generation devices.

I'll say this once again. ATI drafted the OpenGL ES spec - they played the primary role in defining OpenGL ES. IMO OpenGL ES will be the dominate API for mobile 3D, as it should be as it is not proprietary and not under the control of Microsoft.

Dan East

[ToTTenTranz]

If Imagination is targeting the MBX for the PocketPC platform then it is quite logical to build their chip based on D3D Mobile, IMHO. Microsoft has announced 3d games for the pocketpc platform. So I guess they will use the D3D Mobile API. If D3D-M 1.0 is built to take advantage of the MBX's architecture (they talk about a derivative of DX7 with support for vertex shaders), and if they are successfull in launching some good quality games (which I find pretty rare in the present ppc gaming world to be honest), then there should be a chance for the pocketpc to raise as both business tool and gaming device (following the same path as the desktop pcs).

And if I were to speculate... I'd say that if a device with an evolved XScale (higher bus, fpu units, MMX/SSE, 0.9nm etc) and a MBX gpu could be at 350-400$ price tag by 2005, it could even compete with sony's PSP as a gaming device (lesser media features and more functionality (PPC) against higher media features and lesser functionality (PSP)).



It seems to me now that ATi has clearly aimed the 2300 to the cellphone-kind of systems rather than the PDA ones. Maybe there wil be PPCs with the i2300 but I think that in PPCs the OpenGL ES won't have the same initial "boost" in games that we'll find in D3D-M.

Nevertheless, 3D acceleration in a cellphone, if implemented properly, sounds great :)

Well, only time will tell but one thing's for sure: the first cellphone with a dedicated 3d chip to come to market will turn the ngage into a total joke. :D

[sponge]

You act like it isn't a total joke already.

[Winter]

Dan,

I was wondering about a couple of things.

First, do you think ATI will make public their API for the chip?

Second, given that the chip has 2D acceleration am I right thinking that using win32's GDI functions for drawing text or shapes, for example, will be accelerated if used on a device with that chip?

Thanks!

--Eric

I know the thread was dead, but you might want to take a look at the work being done on porting Linux to the e7xx PDA's. Although it is not the w2300 or any of the later models, we can use the w100 (including accel. features). We were lucky enough to dig up some source code that helped.

http://www.mnementh.co.uk/docs/imageon

(Note: Thanks to some of the comments in Pocket Matrix over the last couple of years about the Imageon chips - they have helped in a small way).

[Alexander]

X-forge 2.0 will use OpenGL ES...

[Phoenix]

i don't think pocket pc's or mobile phones are ready for 3d acceleration. Xscale is sorely lacking in support for 3d (no FPU, MMX, etc) 3d graphics relies quite heavily on FPU performance so you can imagine how badly perofrmance suffers in its absence. also the memory in pocket pc's is infinitely slower than SDRAM thus creating another bottleneck. so i imagine that Ati's chip will not give us quite as much of a performance boost as you are all expecting

[Dan East]

Oh, there is no comparison to using the 2300 and software rendering. The rendering quality of the 2300 is better in every way. Internally it uses 64 bit floating point math, so all vertex transformation and projection is extremely accurate. Seams and popping of edges I see in Varium (software) go away when using OpenGL ES / 2300. Bilinear filtering can be used in all cases with the 2300, which again leads to much, much better rendering quality.

There is also no comparison to performance. You can still render many, many times more polys with the 2300 than you could ever hope with software.

The argument isn't whether or not the 2300 is substantially better than what we have now (it is). The discussion is regarding the platform (XScale 400 MHz) not being able to push the 2300 to its limits. The problem is that people are wanting to compare the 2300 to the current generation of cards on desktop machines.

Regarding the lack of a FPU - that is a non-issue. The accuracy and range of floating point is massive overkill when talking about vertex positions. A range of +-32768 (integer) is more than enough for almost all scenerios. The only issue with not having a FPU is really for software engines, which are forced to use fixed point math, lookup tables, fast integer division, etc, which introduces accuracy problems. None of that is an issue with the 2300 because internally it does all of that math in floating point at the hardware level.

Dan East