Quake 3 on your phone

That's pretty bad performance for an Xscale + MBX. 15-20fps with everything on low??

 

I don't about this specific case but, IIRC, OMAP2 is an MBX+VGP while the chip in the Axim is an MBX-lite (noVGP-lite). I would think that, given all other factors being equal, that an OMAP2 would be faster.

 

As I said above, the PDA CPUs do not have FPUs. So PC-ports which are obviously extremely optimized for and built around PC FPU abilities are going to run awful. The Xscale is a little midget CPU with lots of clock speed that counts for little. And Simon F is saying that some of the MBX chips have geometry assistance thru vertex shaders that can help a bit if the port can take advantage of it.

 

Hmm. So you're saying for sure that you know this port uses emulated FP operations?

 

Floating point was converted to fixed point for the 2700g version, but that's still just a small part of what differentiates a PC based source from a handheld ARM XScale target.

 

Paint it any way you want, but the performance is still crappy. You guys may call Xscale a "midget CPU" but its pretty good by handheld standards.

 

The CPU part of XScale isn't even all that big. The chip has lots of stuff integrated other than the CPU. It really is quite a poor performer. But yeah it is the best there is for a PDA.

I used to have a Sharp Zaurus 5500 which as a Strongarm 206MHz (Xscale precursor). I used to play prboom on it (Doom) with timidity software wavetable thru SDL. That was pretty cool but it was totally at its limit and would often become unplayable if the music had too many voices going. Was sweet to see though and the Zaurus keyboard made playing it a pleasure. I suppose it probably performed like a very fast 486 or Pentium 75 maybe. Doom is entirely fixed point though. Timidity must be as well since if it were FP it surely would have been unusable while also running the game. Software FPU emulation is horribly slow.

I just don't see Xscale playing Quake 3 well anytime soon. I mean Q3 was built for P2/P3 which were FAR more capable CPUs than Xscale and they were running at similar clock speeds. Also, Xscale CPUs often have very poor RAM bandwidth and no L2 cache (and very little L1). Their only hope is significant handling of the game by the graphics chip.

 

You guys know there's also PocketQuake, PocketQuakeII, and PocketWolf3D?

PocketQII runs pretty awful though. Quake is totally playable on the newer PDAs.