Graphics Category - Page 13 of 28 - CNX Software

March 4, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Meet Vulkan, The Successor of OpenGL and OpenGL ES 3D Graphics APIs

So far embedded systems are typically using SoCs with GPU supporting OpenGL ES, a subset of the full fledge OpenGL API used in desktop computers and workstations. These royalty-free standards are defined by Khronos Group non-profit organization, and as features in the embedded space and traditional computers merge, the group has now revealed the next-generation OpenGL specs will be called Vulkan. The new API will run on GPUs supporting OpenGL ES 3.1 or greater, take less CPU resources than its predecessors, and support multiple command buffers that can be created in parallel. More work will be required at the application level, but direct GPU control by the drivers will apparently result in less memory copies improving performance, or at least off-loading the CPU. It might be transparent to developers using game engines. GPU drivers will also be less complex. Vulkan will also use the new SPIR-V language shared with OpenCL […]

March 4, 2015March 4, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments

Nvidia Unveils $199 SHIELD Android TV Game Console Powered by Nvidia Tegra X1 Processor

Can it run Crisis? Yes! Nvidia has just announced SHIELD, an Android TV Game Console powered by the latest Tegra X1 SoC coupled with 3GB, 16GB flash, and which I believe to be the very first consumer ARM system with true 4K video output, decoding/encoding up to 60 fps, as well as both VP9 and H.265 codec at 4K resolution. I’m still not 100% sure gaming will be feasible at 4K resolutions. Since they already have a Shield tablet, and Shield portable game console, it would have been nice to find another name though… SHIELD specifications: SoC – NVIDIA Tegra X1 octa-core processor with 4x Cortex A57 cores, 4x Cortex A53 cores, and a 256-core Maxwell GPU System Memory – 3GB RAM Storage – 16 GB + MicroSD slot Video Output – HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz Video – 4K playback and capture up to 60 fps […]

February 27, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Imagination PowerVR GT7900 GPU is Made for Game Consoles and Notebooks

Imaginatino Technologies has just introduced the most powerful GPU of their new PowerVR Series7 GPU family with GT7900 featuring 16 unified shading clusters and 512 ALU cores for game consoles, micro-servers, and notebooks. PowerVR GT7900 is still an embedded GPU with support for OpenGL ES 3.1 + AEP (Android Extension Pack) compatibility, full hardware support for tessellation and ASTC LDR and HDR texture compression standards. The new GPU delivers up to 800 GFLOPS (FP32) or 1.6 TFLOPS (FP16) graphics and compute performance at 800 MHz (using 16 nm FinFET+ manufacturing process), which compares to about 550 GFLOPS (FP32) for an Nvidia GeForce GT730M at comparable frequency. This is even more powerful than the Maxwell GPU found in Tegra X1 which delivers 1+ TFLOPS (FP16), although the Nvidia processor may have a lower power envelope. Combined with PowerVR Series5 decode and encode video processors and PowerVR V2500 camera processor, GT7900 can […]

February 23, 2015February 23, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

ARM Releases Kernel Drivers for Mali-T880 / T860 GPUs, User Space Drivers for Mali-T76x GPUs

ARM Mali GPU drivers includes both open source kernel drivers, and binary userspace drivers supporting framebuffer and/ior X11 implementation. The former is rarely an issue and is quickly released, but the latter requires porting and testing for a specific hardware platform, as well legal work, which greatly delay the releases. Mali-T880 GPU was announced at the beginning of the month together with ARM Cortex A72, and on February 17, 2015, ARM released an update to their Mali-T600 series, Mali-T700 series & Mali-T860/T880 GPU kernel device drivers with revision r5p1-00rel0 that adds supports to Mali-T860 and Mali-T880 GPU. These open source drivers are available for Android and Linux, and also support early Mali-T700 and T600 GPUs. Separately, the company has also released Mali-T76X GPU drivers for Firefly board powered by Rockchip RK3288 quad core Cortex A17 processor featuring a Mali-T764 GPU. The first release only supports the framebuffer driver, but ARM […]

January 26, 2015January 26, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Linux 3D GPU Acceleration Demo on Rockchip RK3288 based Firefly Board

Several devices and development boards based on Rockchip RK3288 processor already support Linux, usually with images based on Ubuntu, including Ugoos UM3 / UT3, Open Hour Chameleon, and Firefly-RK3288 among others. What these images lack however, is support for 2D and 3D graphics acceleration with the GPU, and hardware video decoding/encoding with the VPU. But Jas-hacks has made some progress with 3D graphics support. He has managed to add GPU acceleration via EGL/OpenGL ES bringing 3D acceleration to the platform, but 2D support is not there yet, meaning X11 still heavily relies on software rendering. But the implementation is still good enough to run the usual es2gears and glmark2-es2 benchmarks. as well as some WebGL demos in Chromium. Performance is currently underwhelming, with 50 points in glmark-es2, even a bit lower than the score (54 points) I got with ODROID-X board powered by Exynos 4412 SoC with a Mali-400MP4 GPU, […]

December 10, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Linux 3.18 Released

Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 3.18 last Sunday: It’s been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out. I’d love to say that we’ve figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven’t. At the same time, there’s absolutely no point in having everybody else twiddling their thumbs when a couple of people are actively trying to bisect an older issue, so holding up the release just didn’t make sense. Especially since that would just have then held things up entirely over the holiday break. So the merge window for 3.19 is open, and DaveJ will hopefully get his bisection done (or at least narrow things down sufficiently that we have that “Ahaa” moment) over the next week. But in solidarity with Dave (and to make my life easier too 😉 let’s try to avoid introducing any _new_ […]

October 30, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Qualcomm Releases Userspace Adreno 320 GPU Drivers for Ubuntu

Qualcomm Developer Network has just sent the October Newsletter by email, and they had some news specific to Ubuntu / Linux support on IFC6410 development board powered by a Snapdragon 600 processor. Firs they link to a guest blog post on Qualcomm website entitled “Video Conferencing on Linux with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor“, where Qualcomm partner eInfochips stated: Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.’s leadership in mobile market with Linux Android support is well established. As the demand for Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., increase in adjacent markets, the need for non-Android Linux support becomes evident. Which is always good to read. The rest of the post blog provides a few more details about their a low-latency (50ms glass-to-glass) video conferencing solution based on OpenEmbedded build with Linaro Linux Kernel, and making use of Qt5, Gstreamer, and Sofia SIP library. Further improvements will be achieved with hardware video […]

October 28, 2014October 29, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

ARM Unveils Mali-T800 Series GPUs, Mali-V550 VPU, and Mali-DP550 Display Processor

ARM has just announced several new Mali media IP: three Mali-T800 series GPUs (Mali-T820, Mali-T830, and Mali-T830) based on Midgard architecture, as well as Mali-V500 video accelerator, and the Mali-DP550 display processor. Mali T800 Series GPU The new Mali T-8xx GPUs are based on the same Midgard architecture used in Mali T-6xx and T-7xx GPUs, but deliver better power efficiency thanks to technologies such as ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC), and Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) for imput bandwidth reduction, as well as Transaction Elimination and Smart Composition. ARM provided some performance and energy-comparison between T800 and T600 series (but strangely nothing against T700): The Mali-T820 GPU is optimized for entry-level products, achieving up to 40 percent more performance density compared to the Mali-T622 GPU. The Mali-T830 GPU delivers up to 55 percent more performance than the Mali-T622 GPU. The Mali-T860 GPU provides higher performance and 45 percent more energy-efficiency […]