made framebuffer cacheable; this can speed up rendering considerably
Here are some benchmarks with
GPMark. The dingoo is running at 336MHz, and for each test (using software surface, then hardware surface), the binaries executed on OD and the legacy Dingux are the very same.
All the figures are in FPS.
legacy Dingux, software surface (most of the apps):Blitting test 186.2
Plasma 140.0
Rotozoomer 112.1
Rotozoomer near 141.2
Rotozoomer far 53.0
Radial blur 27.4
3D bunny 4.6
OpenDingux 2011-09-04 (first pre-release), software surface:Blitting test 183.4
Plasma 127.0
Rotozoomer 106.7
Rotozoomer near 128.6
Rotozoomer far 54.5
Radial blur 26.2
3D bunny 4.8
OpenDingux 2011-09-18 (second pre-release), software surface:Blitting test 207.8
Plasma 142.2
Rotozoomer 116.0
Rotozoomer near 142.5
Rotozoomer far 56.5
Radial blur 27.1
3D bunny 4.8
While the first pre-release of OpenDingux did obtain lower values in general, the second pre-release outperforms the legacy Dingux kernel in each one of the tests.
It means that at least for the rendering part, the games compatible with the legacy Dingux will need less time to render on the screen, and at the end they'll run a bit faster (but we can't say that for now as it depends on other parts of the system which haven't been optimized yet).
But using software surfaces on OpenDingux is useful only when you want to keep the compatibility with the older kernel; the next part will show that this new kernel is
much more powerful when using hardware surfaces, which the legacy Dingux can't use without having rendering issues, as hardware surfaces somewhat require double buffering which the legacy Dingux does not have (some emus still use it on legacy, like psx4all, on which the flickering is clearly visible).
legacy Dingux, hardware surface (almost never used):Blitting test 443.7
Plasma 255.9
Rotozoomer 174.4
Rotozoomer near 259.1
Rotozoomer far 67.8
Radial blur 29.9
3D bunny 4.7
OpenDingux 2011-09-04 (first pre-release), hardware surface:Blitting test 171.3
Plasma 111.7
Rotozoomer 101.0
Rotozoomer near 123.3
Rotozoomer far 49.6
Radial blur 25.6
3D bunny 4.8
OpenDingux 2011-09-18 (second pre-release), hardware surface:Blitting test 465.1
Plasma 235.3
Rotozoomer 172.9
Rotozoomer near 240.4
Rotozoomer far 67.3
Radial blur 29.1
3D bunny 4.8
As you can see, the second pre-release version of OD clearly outperforms the first release. Hell, Picodrive did gain ~10fps on the new kernel (at 336MHz)
But you can also notice how faster hardware surfaces are comparing to software surfaces on OpenDingux.
It means that when the whole system will be optimized,
most of the apps will run faster on OD than they were running on the legacy Dingux.
IMPORTANT NOTE: GPMark does stress a lot the video driver, so don't expect that your program will magically run twice faster when switching to hardware surfaces. But it'll probably grab some FPS.