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[Q] Video driver solution... coming this year by Pharos?

I was surfing around wmpoweruser.com and saw this article: http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=2252. It says that Pharos will release this PDA in the Q1 of 2009 and it will rival the HTC Touch HD.
In fact, the specs of the phone are very similar to the HD, but what calls my attention is one really interesting fact: the Pharos phone uses the very same processor as the Touch HD (Qualcomm MSM 7201A 528MHz).
I would like to ask the experts: if the Pharos payed for the video drivers to use hardware acceleration, will it be easy or, at least, possible to import them to Touch HD and we´ll finally have decent video playback?
Thanks!

I think if the drivers for WM existed we would have them by now. I think the GPU is broken and simply doesnt work properly in the Qualcomm CPU or Qualcomm themselves cant get it to work properly, thats why there is only partial support for all its functions.

HTC Touch HD/Diamond/Touch Pro all three of them have video drivers but they are used only with inbuilt players(WMP and video player in gallery). What we need now is to Coreplayer use those DS filters or gain access straight to QTv 'chip' and they said that they finally came to terms with qualcomm about it and now they can start working on it. So one of the upcoming updates(which one I don't know) should finally end this problem but I don't know when it will come.
Here you have link to the topic regarding QTv situation.

The simple test is whether ANY devices on any platform that use the CPU have decent video performance. If not then its clearly a problem with the CPU itself, rather than just the phone manufacturers being cheap.
Qualcomm has other, cheaper CPUs that are just as fast in general terms, but without the GPU, so why fit a CPU with a GPU if your not going to use it?
Sure the HTC Album App can play some files with acceleration, but that is not offering full QTv support and is not providing us with everything the GPU is capable of in theory.
In my view the GPU is broken (or qualcomms implementation is) and therefore writing drivers to fully utilise it is very difficult, which is why there are no fully featured drivers.

Acceleration clearly works - you can play 800*480 high bitrate files in h264 via wmp, but they're a slideshow through other players.

Yes, but its only partial, its not accelerating everything it should. I still say such drivers do not exist, even at qualcomm. Their recent request for windows mobile driver specialists and developers speaks volumes.
It wouldn't be the first time a technology company has launched a broken product on the unsuspecting world, or talked up a product when it really isnt capable of what they claim.

Back to this Traveler 137, it does have impressive specs, looks, gps, and best of all 3G for us T-Mobile USA users! It just won some innovation awards at CES: http://www.pcworld.com/article/1563...ne_offers_navigation_no_network_required.html

I still think that the drivers are here but I think that winmo itself can be blamed for the situation too(using drivers by the system). WinMo should be rewritten for the multimedia so it would bring some universal standards for all video solutions that SoC has to offer. Something like openCL but for mobiles.
The fact that they are looking for programmers and enginners is a good thing and it means that they want to improve the way their products handle wm but it doesn't mean that they don't have people now.
Until somebody gives me concrete proof that the drivers arent there I won't change my opinion. And please don't start talking about GPU problem(which problem I think lies in faulty use or implementation of drivers and that HTC can be blamed cause they take full responsibility of how they configure the device and not SoC maker). I'm only talking here about video acceleration.

Its just that ive seen the same thing happen before, and its usually graphics drivers or memory controllers that suffer. Almost every graphical device we have has some element of broken hardware in it that requires a work around. It may not be the GPU itself, but the interconnect to the CPU, or the way the CPU and GPU interact is just not optimal. Either way something is not right as it is right now.
I very much doubt that there is a driver sitting on a PC in Qualcomm labs that will fix all the issues. I dont believe that no one has been bothered to buy it or that Qualcomm has priced it so high that it wont be used, that makes no sense at all.
HTC are not responsible for the poor driver performance, in fact they have clearly done their own work to work around the issue. What they are responsible for is using the chipset in the first place.
Im waiting to see exactly what Coreplayer ends up like after their improved QTv suport is out. Im willing to bet that it wont make a great deal of difference to anything but H.264 that is already accelerated by the HD native player, but not by Coreplayer currently.

rovex, you might have a point here btw...
I know that the Touch HD runs H264's inloop deblocker in hardware for example. Switching it on or off has no effect on CPU. For pure software decoders it has about 15-25% effect.
Since you can't really apply that specific acceleration to other types of video, it will be interesting to see what other media will be sped up by implementing QTV.

Sony Ericsson SDK for Windows Mobile adds OpenGL ES support to Xperia™ Panels

http://developer.sonyericsson.com/s...ws/newsfeb09/p_xperia_sdk_opengles_update.jsp
The SDK v1.0.5 release adds Xperia Panels with OpenGL ES support, allowing developers to incorporate a broad set of redering, texture mapping, special effects and other powerful visualization functions and provides a graphics pipeline that allows free access to graphics hardware acceleration on the Xperia X1 phone through the Xperia Panels interface.
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So can everybody now finally admit/accept that the drivers are already included in the HTC HD/Diamond/Pro/eXperia etc...
The only problem is that no software so far has ever been coded to work with the MSM7XXX on WinMo (besides TouchFlo 3D and SPB Mobile Shell 3). Every past stuff has been compiled to run on ARMv4/v5 CPUs (MSM7XXX is a v6) and SGX/PowerVR 3D HW (intel2700G)...
Now it's time for HTC to release the SDK they "promised" a lil while ago during the Diamond launch.

yes it was posted earlier..
there's a gl demo inside..
anyone want to play?
it's a real pity that Visual studio is so expensive, would be good to see if it's possible to compile the libgles files.

MAK11 said:
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/s...ws/newsfeb09/p_xperia_sdk_opengles_update.jsp
So can everybody now finally admit/accept that the drivers are already included in the HTC HD/Diamond/Pro/eXperia etc...
The only problem is that no software so far has ever been coded to work with the MSM7XXX on WinMo (besides TouchFlo 3D and SPB Mobile Shell 3). Every past stuff has been compiled to run on ARMv4/v5 CPUs (MSM7XXX is a v6) and SGX/PowerVR 3D HW (intel2700G)...
Now it's time for HTC to release the SDK they "promised" a lil while ago during the Diamond launch.
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Huh, sounds you mix stuff up. Graphics acceleration has nothing to do with the processor and its instruction set. The Qualcomm chip is a chipset, which includes, among much other stuff, an ARM CPU but also a graphics chip (an ATI Imageon i think). The graphics hardware could already be accessed by some 3D games - just have a look here in the forum, it's nothing new. The panel SDK now only allows to use 3D acceleration also for the panels, even though I think you could have achieved this before already by acessing the graphics lib directly. So I'd say it's just more convenient for the programmer now and officially supported.

Render system menus/home screen/sense ui/start screen with GPU ?

Would that even be possible with a mod/cab? its silly to have a GPU which is not bad (its drivers are horrible though-thank god for xda devs for 3rd party ones) and running sense and the whole graphical menu from CPU and not render them from GPU..just look how much smoother are the phones that do (iphone, bb , droid )..if it is possible , could it be cooked into roms? because that would be so, oh so great..

Hmm..Quite a few views , yet no replies...Anyone here care to share their POV ?

I wasnt aware that the GUI is rendered by the phone CPU rather than GPU. But then again, does this phone have a dedicated GPU?

the gpu is part of the cpu, no? i thought it was all on one chip.

samsamuel said:
the gpu is part of the cpu, no? i thought it was all on one chip.
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True that...Yet i have read that winmo do not use the GPU acceleration to run/render the menu(e.t.c) graphics..this is my source (where i have read this)
:
Code:
http://www.techautos.com/2010/03/14/smartphone-processor-guide/
Why is the GPU relevant if I’m not playing games on my phone?
On most modern smartphone platforms (iPhone OS, Android, Palm WebOS, with Windows Mobile as a notable exception), the OS’ user interface itself is composited, meaning it is rendered by the GPU. This makes the interface feel a lot smoother than doing UI display calculations on the already resource-constrained CPU.
On the desktop, Mac OS X introduced many consumers to a GPU-composited desktop, and on the PC side, Windows Vista/7’s Aero interface provides similar functionality. Windows XP, even on a very fast desktop rig, generally never feels quite as smooth while, say, moving around windows, as Windows 7 or Vista running Aero. For the same reason, Windows Mobile 6.x, which uses a similar rendering mode (GDI) as XP and lacks a GPU-composited desktop, is going to feel laggy or rough compared to GPU-composited UIs.
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Could there possibly be a tweak for this?or it is managed deeply into the os core , so it cannot be touched?

I'd be very suprised if it were possible to change the way the software works on such a fundamental level. At a guess, it would mean a rewrite of the OS so that anything sat on top of it automatically used the GPU when rendering for the screen. This is obviously not something that would ever happen.
That's just my understanding of the subject though, and I could be mistaken.

Heh..I know i am noob when it comes to winmo os utilization its no secret..I just thought it would be like a registry tweak to change the part used to process the image output ;p oh well..we never stop learning (and obviously have to begin from somewhere)

I actually thought Sense was already rendered by the GPU? According to the new Chainfire 3D driver - Sense is detected as being accelerated by the driver so must be using the GPU..

The snapdrgon gpu is the AMD Z430 no ?

paulrgod said:
I actually thought Sense was already rendered by the GPU? According to the new Chainfire 3D driver - Sense is detected as being accelerated by the driver so must be using the GPU..
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sense is..and that is because it is created by htc , not microsoft (what a surprise lol ;p )you sir are correct..

Ice Cream Sandwich hardware acceleration?

After looking through engadgets live blog there was no mention of hardware acceleration being added to android 4.0. With that being said that was my hopes of 4.0 bringing true smoothness that both ios and WP7 have been having all along. Now i know there is 3d animation ( i may be wrong ) but i know that isn't the full acceleration. Question asked does it have it?

Yes, Android 4.0 features 2D Hardware Acceleration (as originally added in Honeycomb), with some improvements.
Additionally, applications can take advantage of the GPU (Photos, Video & Gallery, for example) for on-the-fly transform effects. For example, if you perform edits in Gallery to a photo, it's actually loaded as a texture in OpenGL, and the "effects", or transforms, are applied leveraging the GPU to vastly improve performance.
Likewise, the panoramic "stitching" is GPU accelerated, and video capture (compression) and streaming (transformations, such as silly faces) are GPU accelerated.
It remains to be seen if the GPU is being used for other aspects of the OS, for example, being leveraged by the browser to assist in webpage rendering, etc. However, even as it is right now, it's a massive step up in quality and performance, and should facilitate wonderful UI/UX experiences for ICS even on older devices, like the Evo, Nexus One, Droid X, etc.

Shidell said:
It remains to be seen if the GPU is being used for other aspects of the OS, for example, being leveraged by the browser to assist in webpage rendering, etc. However, even as it is right now, it's a massive step up in quality and performance, and should facilitate wonderful UI/UX experiences for ICS even on older devices, like the Evo, Nexus One, Droid X, etc.
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Oh really! Are we to believe that somehow the Evo's GPU will be ICS supported for hardware acceleration? Will that require a HTC-specific ICS update, or is it workable for AOSP before HTC codes in their hardware acceleration?

thegregbradley said:
Oh really! Are we to believe that somehow the Evo's GPU will be ICS supported for hardware acceleration? Will that require a HTC-specific ICS update, or is it workable for AOSP before HTC codes in their hardware acceleration?
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Well, it isn't really a device-specific feature.
Hardware acceleration in the UI is akin to playing a 2D game, like Angry Birds. The system is actually leveraging OpenGL to handle 'displaying', or 'rendering', the game. Likewise, the UI is 'displayed', or 'rendered', the same way.
The way this relates to Android 4.0 is like this: Hardware acceleration was added to Android in Honeycomb (3.0), and in order to take advantage of it, requires a GPU that is capable of supporting OpenGL 2.0 with drivers that are compatible with OpenGL 2.0. If you have a capable GPU with capable drivers, the OS will use the GPU to render the UI, and voila, hardware acceleration.
If any of those components are not available (or perhaps not working correctly), Android defaults to "software acceleration", which is what has always been present in Android for phones. 1.0 all the way through 2.3.7 all use software acceleration. That is, all of the UI elements are rendered by the CPU.
You've probably experienced lag thanks to this--scroll through your contacts list quickly, flip between full home screens, or load up an intensive Live Wallpaper and open your Launcher and try scrolling--you'll probably find slowdown, if not stuttering in places. This is because the CPU is doing the heavy lifting not only for the OS, but also to render the display.
By alleviating this pressure on the CPU, we free up the phone to do work it's better at handling--running the OS. Additionally, because GPUs are actually designed for rendering, they are far, far more efficient at doing so than the CPU. The result? A massive overhead reduction overall on Android on devices, that means improved performance across the board as well as a much more pleasing user experience.
This is fantastic news for devices new and old; but a real treat for those of us with older phones, as the reduced CPU overhead coupled with GPU acceleration should mean noticeable performance improvements, as well as a drastic reduction in stuttering, lag, jittery-ness in the UI, etc.
Best of all, it should be very simple to implement. Most hardware supports OpenGL 2.0 (our Evos do, for example), and most drivers for that hardware also support OpenGL 2.0 (as our Evos do), so it should really be as easy as building Android 4.0 with the appropriate drivers, and then experience the bliss of a hardware-accelerated Android for the first time.
(Note that this explanation doesn't touch on using the GPU for additional benefit, like editting photos, videos, offloading work from the CPU as I touched on above, etc.)

man that was a bunch of good info i needed +1 will be glad when our evos have that much needed acceleration

Dude Shidell thank you so much for that in depth explanation! You covered everything I could have possibly wondered about, haha. A king amongst men, and a god amongst kings, you are.

Thanks alot shidell that really helps me out alot. I just have one question, did anyone here about usb host, on 4.0?
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

BmW13294 said:
Thanks alot shidell that really helps me out alot. I just have one question, did anyone here about usb host, on 4.0?
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
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yeah i read that the galaxy nexus was having a usb 2.0? i will check some images to see if its true

Naturally, Ice Cream Sandwich is onboard, with Google finally revealing the version number as 4.0. Other specs include an HD Super AMOLED display (1,280 x 720), a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 5 megapixel rear camera (with LED flash), a 1.3 megapixel front-facing cam, 1080p video recording and playback, a newfangled panorama mode, a 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth 3.0. You'll also find USB 2.0(right there), 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, an embedded NFC module, accelerometer, compass, gyro, proximity sensor and even a barometer -- yeah, a barometer. Finishing things out, there's 1GB of RAM, 16 or 32GB of internal storage space and a 1,750mAh battery. info gathered from Engadget listing all the galaxy nexus specs

Happy to share information.
BmW13294 said:
Thanks alot shidell that really helps me out alot. I just have one question, did anyone here about usb host, on 4.0?
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
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Yeah, Android 4.0 builds upon the USB Host support that was integrated in Honeycomb, which means it has native support for a variety of USB devices. Granted, I don't know the depth of devices or support, but it is present.

Nice explanation shi.

AMD!

Hello!
This isn't relevant to hacking but I need to know about the AMD 8120 CPU, as if you guys are hacking windows 8 hopefully you'll be able to help me out here.
I'm building a new pc system but cannot seem to find anywhere on the internet if the 8120 has any sort of intergrated graphics?

Definitely not the right place to ask, but what the hell... the FX 8xxx series does not have any built-in graphics. There may be a low-end graphics chip built into the motherboard, however. Alternatively, AMD does have a line of CPU+GPU combined chips. They run a little underpowered as CPUs (even for AMD), being equivalent to Intel's i3 chips at best and usually not even that. However, they come with quite respectable middle-of-the-line GPUs, and for most games, that's what you need.
If you just need *some* sort of graphics and don't need it to be really gaming-quality, though, then you probably don't need one of those higher-end hybrids. I'd suggest that you look at the products on AMD.com, and do a search for motherboards with integrated graphics on your favorite product-comparison site (Newegg is my usual go-to, but I haven't bought much PC hardware in the last few years).

Adarzannh said:
Hello!
This isn't relevant to hacking but I need to know about the AMD 8120 CPU, as if you guys are hacking windows 8 hopefully you'll be able to help me out here.
I'm building a new pc system but cannot seem to find anywhere on the internet if the 8120 has any sort of intergrated graphics?
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I am an owner of an FX-8120. I can tell you like the last guy did that it doesn't have integrated graphics. It's an 8-core chip clocked at 3.2Ghz stock. Now granted, it may not have an GPU processor on the chip, but you can customize graphic settings to allow the chip to process all of the video rendering. Usually this results in poor performance as GPU chips are alot more efficient when processing graphics. I have a 560gtx and the 8120 clocked at 3.8ghz. I use the GPU to render. Honestly though, you should get a 2500k or an 2600k. I've had nothing but headaches with my 8120. It sucks alot of power, it gets really hot and it locks up quite a bit.