Suitability for real-time games?

[billk]

Hi,

I'm new to BREW, have read some of the FAQs, played with the emulator examples, and browsed the forum archives a bit... But I haven't seen a discussion yet on what kind of frame-rate one can expect to achieve in a real-time graphics application... :confused:

I'd be grateful to anyone who could post some of their experiences about generally what level of real-time graphics are possible on these cell phones? I've that BREW doesn't provide direct access to the frame buffer, and that even drawing an image from memory into the frame buffer seems a little odd (open up a "stream", and have the graphics in BMP format?)..... :eek:

Anyway, in general I'd like to ask whether games like Pong and Brickout are possible? What about Loderunner, Choplifer?

Wolfenstein, DOOM ?? :D

Thanks much,

Bill

[Craig Evans]

Originally posted by billk
I'm new to BREW, have read some of the FAQs, played with the emulator examples, and browsed the forum archives a bit... But I haven't seen a discussion yet on what kind of frame-rate one can expect to achieve in a real-time graphics application... :confused:
There was a lot of discussion about this in the old mailing list regarding graphics performance under 1.0/1.1.

While the graphics capabilities have been greatly improved in 2.0, for disucssion on frame rates etc for current devices, you might like to check out the BREW Forums Archive (http://brewlists.qualcomm.com/pipermail/brew-developers/).

CSE

[billk]

You are part of the rebel alliance, and a traitor!!!


......Whoops, just seem to have gotten sidetracked by your .sig. :)


Thanks for the info. Most of the discussion in the archives talked about 500ms screen update times. Holy guacamole!

There was one promising-sounding bit of info right before the mailing list archives ended:

Mahesh Khilnany writes, "For the Sharp phone, it takes ~11 ms to do a bitblt of an 89x89 image. The entire operation of converting the bmp to the native format and updating the screen takes 110 ms."

...Anyone know if the Sharp phone referred to is an anomaly, or perhaps indicitave of a new generation of phones that are a little peppier? I guess what I'm really asking, is if people would bet that six months or so from now there would be a reasonable number of phones out there behaved like the "Sharp" rather than the sluggish 500msec variety...

Thanks!

Bill

[Craig Evans]

The recent BREWCon launched v2.0. and yes "I feel a disturbance in the force" (or maybe that is just the aftermath of my visit to TJ last weekend :))

If your application developement cycle is likley to be pushed out to around the end of the year, it might be worthwhile skipping v1.x, and going straight for 2.0.

The graphics capabilities are a huge improvement. There is (or will be) a 3d engine, improved graphic primatives, and sprites. Indeed the demo of the sprites was kinda cool - in a retro 80's/90's mario/donkeykong type scrolling platform game. The network capabilities might see some interesting mutliplayer games comingout too.

Response times on the hardware were not great, but APPEARED to be up to the performance of an original GameBoy (with the added bonus of colour - as opposed to a GameBoy Color which also had speed/hardware improvements).

I am looking forward to this platform - we now need the very cool handsets that are just around the corner to be released.

CSE

[tom]

Hey, do y'all know if the archives have been truncated?

I downloaded the entire 4MB raw archive and can't find the discussion that billk quoted from. I'm searching on exact parts of the quoted text, and i'm sure it's not in the archive.

The BREW List archive runs for 7 months: May to November of 2001. From what i can tell, the BREW Forums opened in early March of 2002, so there's a 3 month gap.

Does anyone have the archives for those 3 months?

Thanks!

[flarb]

BREW 2.0 doesn't include BREW 3D. As far as I know, that's slated for BREW 3.0. And I wouldn't recommend targetting BREW 2.0 until well into next year. The vast majority of the handsets in customers' hands will be 1.1 and earlier until BREW 2.0 has been out for awhile.

As for frame rates, it varies per phone. The T720 can seemingly only do like 7-10 fps or so full screen updates. The LG4400 is actually quite zippy. So it's hardware dependent, really.

[markb]

3D will be an extension, and not tied to a particular version of BREW, so it's possible that a 2.0 phone could have I3D at some point in the future.

As for performance, drivers are a large part of it. I have personally seen a large improvement in the update speed on one device, just due to software changes. Unfortunately, OEMs don't always spend a lot of time optimizing when they do their BREW ports. Of course, hardware has something to do with it, too. For instance, one phone design may use a serial interface to the LCD controller, while another uses a parallel interface. I don't know about the specifics of the 4400 or the T720.

[polygonsheep]

Speaking of software updates, does flashing the phone with a new software version reset the test bit? (i.e. will I have to resend the phone back to Qualcomm?)

[Murray Bonner]

I have only upgraded the software on the Sharp Z800. In this case the test bit was not reset as a result.