Nvidia Tegra X1
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Nvidia Tegra X1
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http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8811/nvidia-tegra-x1-preview Can't wait for the Shield Tablet with the Tegra X1. 01-05-2015, 09:05 PM
(01-05-2015, 04:10 PM)Dolp Wrote: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html Might not have to be a tablet either Nvidia has sais the X1 is also more suitable for smartphones this time around. 01-06-2015, 01:00 AM
(01-05-2015, 09:05 PM)cruise871 Wrote:(01-05-2015, 04:10 PM)Dolp Wrote: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html freaking FINALLY! I dont personally like tablets (this isnt a bias, I have three of them actually, lol) because my Galaxy Note III is the PERFECT size for all my mobile needs. I would love to be able to play Dolphin on-the-go with it. Would be a dream come true. OHH!!! What if you could use the S-Pen as like a Wiimote somehow? That would be so cool! Get on that, Sonicadvance1! 01-08-2015, 09:01 AM
From what Nvidia has said, it sounds like they're trying to aim this more at intelligent computer driven cars. Did they really say they were going to push this to be in smartphones besides vague suggested implementations? They did make it a point to show a gaming tech demo to boast its power.
Forgive my possible ignorance here, i'm not as tech savvy when it comes to phones and tablets as much as PC's. But my question is what sort of substantial speed benefit the X1 will have compared to the K1 when it comes to Dolphin and emulation in general? While it's cool to see Unreal Engine 4 tech demos running on a chip that can target smartphone sized devices (far from a smooth demonstration as it looked kind of choppy), from my experience emulators are far less demanding on GPU's and far more demanding on CPU power, compared to PC games where the opposite is true (even a lot of discrete or integrated GPU's will run Dolphin decently at native resolutions). From what i've read and seen of the Tegra X1 platform, it's primary upgrade over prior mobile devices appears to be on the graphical side of things. That i'm certain would offer major benefits to native games coded specifically for the device in question, ones that are designed to take advantage of all the CPU cores and push the GPU power hard. But an application like Dolphin relies on a lot more traditional brute force CPU power elements such single threaded performance and a high clock speed. The X1 is probably going to reduce graphical bottlenecks previous mobile GPU's had and allow higher resolutions and other image enhancements. But i'm curious as to what extent the boost in performance will be. The info i've read indicates the X1 uses a 64-bit 8-core setup. 4 Cortex-A53 cores and 4 Cortex-A57 cores (the A57 cores being the performance oriented cores). Dolphin on PC only uses 2 CPU cores (only LLE audio is able to use a third core and LLE's usefulness is about to end with HLE having matured close to perfection). So unless the Android port is different or the Dolphin developers find a way to use more cores in the future, only two of those high performance cores will be useful. Also, while i'm sure A57 is an improvement over the K1's A15, i'm guessing it's still nowhere remotely close to matching any reasonably modern Intel CPU in single threaded performance, especially considering their overclocking potentials. I've been using a very old smartphone from 2010 so i'm not able to see how well Dolphin plays on Android, but i have seen videos of the Shield Tablet and Nexus 9. While i'm impressed at how well the emulator DOES run on said devices (testament to the talent of the Dolphin developers moreso than the power of these devices i'd say), it's still far too slow for what i'd consider a consistently playable or enjoyable state. Not a lot of games seem to run at more than about half speed, and a lot run well under that. Even ones that appear fullspeed at first glance will start to chug tremendously on more intensive parts. Here's some examples- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtxijC6qS0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS7yIQtL2BY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GAdmkiPTBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LGuNLW5H-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa3Axm13OuE 01-08-2015, 09:31 AM
You're overlooking something big: ARMv8 is a lot different from ARMv7. In particular the ability to finally support unaligned memory accesses (along with the large amount of GPRs and hardware floating point support) gives it the ability to reach (and surpass) x86 levels of performance. The current Android builds of Dolphin that everybody is testing are still using ARMv7 because there's only one ARMv8(/AArch64) device available (Nexus 9) and the AArch64 JIT is under heavy development.
01-08-2015, 11:24 AM
That's why I asked for clarification, thanks for answering as i was sure a developer would know far more than myself. I'm no expert in how modern mobile chips compared to PC (not that i'm any expert with PC CPU's either but better than mobile at least). Wasn't sure what performance benefits the newer ARMv8 architecture chips would have over ARMv7. Or at least what effect they might have on emulation in particular.
So you would say that the X1 and Nexus 9 could legitimately run many if not all GC/Wii games around full speed once Dolphin implements better ARMv8 support? That's interesting. By saying it could match or surpass x86 performance, what x86 CPU are you using for reference? Or are you including even the top of the line latest ones such as Intel Haswell? I ask because the performance of x86 CPU's is dramatically different in Dolphin depending on the brand (AMD vs Intel), generation (Sandy vs Ivy vs Haswell) and clock speed (2ghz vs 3ghz vs 4ghz). My i5 gets good speed in Dolphin at 4ghz. Been a while since I tried it at the stock 3.4ghz, but last I tried about a year ago I had some performance dips. I would guess recent optimizations have remedied some of the issues, but i wouldn't be surprised if I still ran into some issues at 3.4ghz. From what i've found online, Cortex-A57 is capable of running at up to 3ghz. I don't know if that clockspeed is achievable in real world application, particularly for an 8-core smartphone with a powerful GPU. It would truly be something if ARM chips started matching or even exceeding desktop Intel CPU's. I hope game developers don't squander this power as much as they have been so far (IMHO) with mobile tech. It sounds like once these ARMv8 chips become more mainstream, ports of even higher end 7th and 8th generation console and PC games could be quite possible. Not just Trine 2. 01-08-2015, 12:17 PM
I definitely wouldn't say that most/all games will be full speed on current gen hardware with the AArch64 recompiler in place.
It will definitely be faster so some more games should run full speed over the ARMv7 recompiler. AArch64 will definitely have a longer life in Dolphin than ARMv7, and will also have more things implemented in it than what ARMv7 has. Main issue is that mobile ARM SoCs will never get to the same performance levels as desktop x86 CPUs. The TDP difference is far too much to overcome with just a different architecture 01-08-2015, 12:24 PM
(01-08-2015, 09:55 AM)Sonicadvance1 Wrote: Heavy development is here: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/1852 (01-08-2015, 12:17 PM)Sonicadvance1 Wrote: I definitely wouldn't say that most/all games will be full speed on current gen hardware with the AArch64 recompiler in place. Sweet. Not long till AArch64 support on the Nexus 9. Have you switched to an OpenGL context yet on the Nexus 9 yet? 01-08-2015, 12:31 PM
It's impossible to create an OpenGL context on the Nexus 9.
The latest version of Nvidia's video drivers do provide two of the major desktop OpenGL extensions we use, and they provide these with OpenGL ES 3.1. These two extensions are GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex and GL_EXT_buffer_storage. So if Google updates to the driver version that provides those two extensions then a large amount of our problems are gone there. Not all of them of course, just the main major performance problem. |
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