Nokia N93 - first Nokia with HW accelerator

I am glad to let you know that N93 sales started yesterday. Just submitted some benchmark results with final sales SW: http://jbenchmark.com/result.jsp?benchmark=hd

Just a reminder, check out Khronos booth at SIGGRAPH06 to meet me and N93, the happy couple

Edit: for those who are wondering the poor quality score in bilinear texturing test, jbenchmark uses tiny (4x4, if I remember correctly) texture for this test. Our HW scales all textures to 8x8 minimum to optimize memory accesses, and the the pixel accurate test fails. Free bilinear with 8x8 or larger textures works just fine in N93.

 

Well, in theory, we could compress the textures M3G passes on to OpenGL ES, but we do not. It's just how our HW handles tiny textures internally.

Anyways, this is not a big issue. Real world use cases that a) use so small (1x1, 2x2 or 4x4) textures b) with bilinear filtering and c) expects accurate results are quite rare. I can name just one

 

Well in that sense you are correct that with native code the performance difference between any of the competition is even greater than observed +2x seen here.. Too bad there are no heavy enough native benchmark content to test against with, even 3dmarkmobile is too light weight..

 

Yes, that content is considerably heavier. However, it was done by FM for Nokia (premiered behind closed doors with development macro @ E3Expo 2005), and Nokia owns the content. Thus, it cannot be used by FM for benchmarking as such.

Which reminds me.. that demo was left to background for a while since we were busy to get N93 drivers in shape. We will put some polishing effort into it during flight to Boston.

 

To answer a bit more than Patric (without actually saying anything, we simply cannot achieve equal level of performance through-out product portfolio. It wouldn't make any sense either. However, we will do what ever it takes to minimize the fragmentation, mainly from feature side. It is then up to application developer to either detect the performance level and adjust content accordingly or provide manual adjustments to features (like in PC world).

While we do have a transition period to handle (performance difference of sw rasterizer vs. hw acceleration), in long run, once hw acceleration becomes commodity, this won't be such a big deal - generally more powerful devices tend to have higher screen resolutions and thus higher performance requirement for the same content. If your favourite game runs 15fps vs. new model runs it 30fps... you do the same as on pc and upgrade your gear, if you really want the higher performance.

 

Nokia has been one of the most active companies in OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, and will certainly be one of the first to productize it (if not, consider me sacked. Perhaps the most appealing feature of ES2.0 is the fact that industry gets rid of fairly large amount of vendor specific extensions that causes fragmentation to market and gives grey hair to the developer.

As said earlier, we try to do everything to minimize the feature differences between the devices. Let's take N93 for an example. We decided not to expose any of the hardware's vendor specific extensions, including vertex shaders. This was a painful decision but removed need of quite substancial double-codepath from applications. However, we did leave vendor specific texture compression available, since omitting that would have caused significant performance hit. In this case though, it is quite stright-forward from developer to include both compressed and non-compressed textures. This is one reason we drove OES_compressed_ETC1_RGB8_texture to ES2.0 spec. Every Nokia ES2.0 device will feature this compression format, guaranteed. And it seems to be no problem for every gfx core vendor out there to support it.

To answer to your question, my feeing is that gaming alone will never justify the adoptation speed of Asian market. There is no point of being the first in the market, but to be the first profitable in the market. However, gaming is not the only use case for graphics. Our S60 UI already is totally based on SVG, and OpenVG acceleration is becoming more and more important. In addition, OpenGL ES will be featured in number of non-gaming applications in future. And all of these combined justify the existance of graphics hw in a convergence product like our handhelds are.