[bedoig]

Some very interesting comments from NuShrike and sakajati in the XDA thread. Well worth reading, but quoted here:

Originally Posted by NuShrike

Nice find!

• Most non-HTC implementations do do text right. There's something wrong with the Diamond drivers that crap out the text.
• It is XSCALE optimized-software D3D (not hardware ATI), so at least better than the reference D3D HTC used to ship. I think ARMv6, which is the Kaiser, does support many of the XSCALE optimizations although not the specific WMMX ones.
• GLBenchmark uses OpenGL, not D3D so you won't see a difference
• These "drivers" are beta 1 built in 2003. Grain of salt action.
• May be better than thin wrapper around OpenGL like the real drivers are, but you may lose GPU coprocessing meaning less CPU headroom for stuff like game AI, physics math, etc.
• It does rely on DirectDraw so we may gain ATI hardware surface speedup from that since HTC did implement some ATI hardware support in the 3.28, and post, DDI.dlls.
• D3Ddemo is running ~80-90 fps although the refresh on lights.exe seems more noticeable. Seems much better than KaiserGL drivers.
• Are the transitions between colors rougher in this driver like it's not doing any bilinear filtering/anti-aliasing?
• I don't see how it can be reliant on the KaiserGL drivers since it neither imports nor LoadLibrary() on anything external.
• Does not require HTC-CA drivers to be installed, but may require HTC WM6.1 official (3.28 and after). I recommend these drivers over d3d_ati.dll unless these happen to use more CPU

Isn't this ing how much faster properly optimized drivers of any sort can be? HTC/Qualcomm just cannot code/implement. Now if more driver files from either Toshiba G810, or the Omnia show up, yay!

felix: I don't know of any D3D apps besides the samples that come from HTC-CA. I think most developers avoid D3D because it's broken on most devices.

Originally Posted by NuShrike

I did some Googling and there's 3 types of drivers used in Windows Mobile:

1. reference: for CETK golden image testing
2. software: written by MS, okay for production release/use
3. optimized: written by OEM to support hardware acceleration

Somehow, HTC is getting away with shipping the reference driver which MS supposedly has forbidden for release/redistribution (according to a Don Couch). This reference driver does a bunch of quality checking and comparisons internally that is never used in a production release. Think of it as you're driving your car and checking the fluid levels, tire pressure, tread level, aerodynamics, etc every second.


So, this Samsung XSCALE is the driver HTC is supposed to have released if they couldn't have a Qualcomm optimized version because it at least uses the HWA that the ARMv5 XSCALE supports and standardized in our ARMv6.

Originally Posted by sakajati

Thanks for your comments and analysis.

I did some googling too and found out actually this driver had been discussed/mentioned on many sites including MSDN since a few years a go

If we could get some improved 2d software drivers we'd really be flying. Here's hoping!