07-08-2018, 08:38 AM
(07-08-2018, 12:45 AM)dkryder Wrote: looking through 6 year old .pdf you linked i asked myself "self, at what point is it time to just move on?". self answered with, "click red "X" in upper right hand corner". done. ymmv.
Yes, it's old. But in a way it's the owner's manual for the OpenGL ES that's built into the Mali 450. I've been trying to get started studying OpenGL ES for a month or three, with a lot of false starts. You don't want to just study OpenGL, in fact you may not even want to have it installed, because that's likely to lead you down the path of software rendering. If you want full acceleration you need to study what's built into the chip. That can't change.
I've been around Linux for 20 years now. I remember OpenGL as slow and pretty. That's because it was software rendered. I don't know yet if there's any advantage beyond accelerated X to even having a Mali for using software like the OpenGL you'd install from the debs. Maybe that passes primitive stuff to the native EGL, I don't know. I've read you have to be careful what your programs are linking to. Generic OpenGL these days will run on about anything, I want to drive the Mali, if for no other reason than to take load off the CPU and shift it to the GPU.
What I want to find time to work on is SDR, software defined radio. "shaders" in OpenGL are little programs that run in the GPU. I think I can pass an array of realtime radio data to a shader and have it calculate and plot on the screen, which frees the CPU do things like demodulating the audio. There's a very significant fraction of a Rock64's processing power sitting there in the GPU, I'm trying to be sure I'm using it.