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by monobogdan
358 days ago
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Huge thanks for your reply! It means a lot for me. I'm tech author and one of my topics are about retro-GPU's, especially rare now like Intel i740, SiS Mirage Graphics, VIA UniChrome aka S3 Savage/Chrome and, of course, 3dfx Voodoo. > The drivers may not be easy to find, but OpenGL would not work without drivers It is. Android previously has (and still have) so-called PixelFlinger, which was very fast sw gles 1.1 implementation. Also Android lacked of 2D GPU acceleration prior to 3.0 (partial) and 4.2 (full). Due to lack of GPU drivers, T-Mobile G1 was shipped without any GPU acceleration despite the existence of driver for some other device. What is much more interesting, is that first versions of CyanogenMod had proper driver, i.e libGLES_qcom.so with proper Q3D functions and OpenGL wrappers around them ;) Also I remember Windows Mobile smartphones from HTC on qcom chipsets which lacked not only d3dm drivers (native for WM), but gles too. For example, HTC Kaiser aka TyTN II. And after one year some other model on same chipset was released with driver, so community just put q3d dlls into Windows folder and got fully working 3D ;) Yet again, thanks for your reply! It's always interesting to learn something new ;) |
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Now that you mention it, that rings a bell. I was very much a product of the fancy new programmable shader era --so much so that I jumped into OpenCL as soon as Apple reached out to GPU vendors.
I have no idea whether any Adreno 120 devices shipped without GPU acceleration enabled. The release date of the HTC Dream around late 2008 is significant, because that means it may have been affected by Qualcomm's acquisition of AMD's handheld IP group, which is where all the Adreno folks were working (including me). It was a chaotic time, with different members of the team joining Qualcomm at different dates, months apart. It's very possible that some releases were "suboptimal" around that time.
> Also I remember Windows Mobile smartphones from HTC on qcom chipsets which lacked not only d3dm drivers (native for WM), but gles too.
IIRC that work was done by one or two ATI old-timers out in Orlando, based on code inherited from ATI. Smart guys, but way under staffed.
Those early years were chaotic in the mobile GPU space. Lots of buggy crappy drivers, lots of buggy crappy hardware. It got better once the teams got bigger and we hired more experienced engineers and managers from desktop GPUs.
Thanks for the questions. Rarely get a chance to talk about that stuff.