As popular as OA is for a FOSS linux 3d game benchmark, I don't think it cuts the mustard for showing off Videocore gains given the API translation (GL1->GLES) and SDL1 fixery it has to go through to work, along with a QVM interpreter on top of all the software lighting calcs that don't have any NEON or shader optimizations.

They should test using SuperTuxKart, an older Nexuiz or something along those lines that might actually use a vertex shader for speed.... there's got to be something better within an apt-get's reach at raspbian!!!

I'm really interested, how DOSBox will run on it. Even with 3B+, DOSBox experience isn't that great.

Srandista wrote:

I'm really interested, how DOSBox will run on it. Even with 3B+, DOSBox experience isn't that great.

Same here. Benchmarks are showing between 2x and 5x improvement; so at a minimum that bumps DOSBox cycles to 60,000. But if we're lucky we might cap out around 100,000 cycles or a bit beyond, which would allow for running most of the late-era DOS games at smooth framerates. (Quake, Big Red Racing, EuroFighter 2000, ...)

The improvements to I/0 are the most welcome to me. Finally gigabit ethernet and USB 3.0. Any word yet on whether or not the micro SD slot support SDHC and images greater than 32gb? That really put the pi in the stone age, as far as internal storage. A high performance 128gb SD card would be a god send for these little boards.

As for the CPU and GPU performance... I'll take it. The clock speeds and core architecture should put it on par with similar rockchip single boards, which is plenty good enough. You need an exponential leap in performance before more complex emulation or applications are in reach anyhow. n64, dreamcast, PSP, decent Dosbox, and more should be viable now, provided the GPU is enough up to snuff.

These could also make tidy little file servers or network routers. Lots of exciting applications. I am curious about the price. 49.99$ or less would be fine by me, but much more expensive puts the pi in a different category of single board computers than it was before.

EDIT: Another cool feature of the pi's was analog out via the GPIO and the 3.5mm jack. This made it a great little emulation box for old school CRT tubes (240p goodness). I'll be disappointed if that feature didn't make it to the pi 4.

I'm more curious on how far you can take Reicast, PCem and PPSSPP on it, and how capable VCVI really is (allegedly Vulkan was in the plans). Maybe it's finally powerful enough to run a web browser...

leileilol wrote:

I'm more curious on how far you can take Reicast, PCem and PPSSPP on it, and how capable VCVI really is (allegedly Vulkan was in the plans). Maybe it's finally powerful enough to run a web browser...

The benchmarks I have seen show the new A72 cores to be at least 80% faster than the A53 cores. I have experience with the rockchip 3288 based android devices, and I have found them to be surprisingly capable emulation machines. The RPI 4 CPU should be around the same level or potentially faster.

https://i0.wp.com/www.open-electronics.org/wp … esize=620%2C349

The GPD 🤣 uses a rockchip 3288 at and has been tested quite extensively as an emulation device. It seems like that should be a good point of reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHNoRvO2SmE
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/7 … held_emulation/

PPSPP will probably work fine if the GPU is good. The OGL version has very similar performance to vulkan anyhow, but that comes down to drivers. Accurate dreamcast emulation is probably too much to ask, but a stripped down emulator should run at least some games fairly well. I expect that DOSBOX emulation up to the performance level of a 486DX66 shouldn't be a problem.

Rpi3 was already hitting around 486DX66-ish Dosbox emulation though (with the arm dynarec)! It might be more like 486DX4120-ish now.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Any word yet on whether or not the micro SD slot support SDHC and images greater than 32gb? That really put the pi in the stone age, as far as internal storage.

Don't know about this, just that microSD transfer speeds are doubled in comparison to previous RPi.

mothergoose729 wrote:

I am curious about the price. 49.99$ or less would be fine by me, but much more expensive puts the pi in a different category of single board computers than it was before.

Pricing is already available, there are 3 SKUs, 1GB RAM/$35, 2GB RAM/$45, 4GB RAM/$55. I would say, that prices are really really good, for what you get.

mothergoose729 wrote:

EDIT: Another cool feature of the pi's was analog out via the GPIO and the 3.5mm jack. This made it a great little emulation box for old school CRT tubes (240p goodness). I'll be disappointed if that feature didn't make it to the pi 4.

This should be already confirmed too. I'm not 100% sure about GPIO part, but it's completely backwards compatible with previous RPi's, and as for 3,5mm jack, that is again TRSS jack with audio and composite video output.

I hope they have better display drivers.
My experience with the RPi3B+ was that the drivers were somewhat hit-and-miss.
You either had the OpenGL ES driver, which was fast, but extremely limited. Or you had a full OpenGL driver, which was much more compatible and more feature-rich, but performance was completely horrible.

This meant that when I ported my OpenGL code as-is, performance was very poor.
And when I converted it to OpenGL ES, I ran into various snags and limitations, that I hadn't even found on OpenGL ES implementations of early iPhones and Android phones (like a Samsung Galaxy S Plus).

I'm glad that the RPi 4 has analogue AV outputs still. Being a radio friend, I wished they had added a simple mic-in pin to that existing 3.5" mm jack.
This would allow for analogue measurements, easy morse code decoding, SSTV, RTTY and so on. Alas, you can't have everyhting, I guess. 🙁

Scali wrote:

I hope they have better display drivers.

Yeah. From experience with waiting months just for them to fix their GL driver at all after Stretch came out and regressed that without warning, it's going to be a very long while until there's full functionality for VC6 in Raspbian. For VC4, only using EGL or MX explicitly would be the fastest.

Have they moved to using Eric Anholt's Gallium based fully open driver?

Srandista wrote:

mothergoose729 wrote:

Any word yet on whether or not the micro SD slot support SDHC and images greater than 32gb? That really put the pi in the stone age, as far as internal storage.

Don't know about this, just that microSD transfer speeds are doubled in comparison to previous RPi

In practice the sky is the limit. I'm personally running 128 and 256GB Samsung and SanDisk microSD cards in my 3B with zero issues. I've use EXT4, NILFS2, and now F2FS for filesystem formats.
There are plenty of reviews of people using 400 GB cards, if you want to drop that kind of money on it... although most people flip over to USB for bulk storage at that point.

I have no doubt the new 1TB microSD cards will also work fine, but again the cost is outrageous compared to USB storage, plus the RPi's SD controller performance is dismal (~25 MB/s on the Pi3s, and a pathetic 50 MB/s on the Pi4, even though many high-end cards can move hundreds of MB/s now). When I get a Pi4, I'll pair it with a 16GB SD card for the boot + OS partition, and then use a 256 or 400 GB microSD card in a tiny USB 3.0 thumb-reader to benefit from the Pi4's massive USB 3.0 rates.

leileilol wrote:

Maybe it's finally powerful enough to run a web browser...

Man, I wish. Full-fledged PCs are barely powerful enough to run web browsers. My laptop battery is good for a full business day doing almost anything. Unless I'm in the web management interface of a firewall. Then I can see the % fall off before my eyes. It's also the one task that will be the driver to upgrade my 5-year-old smartphone.

Every time web browsers get more capable, and even more efficient, web developers make sites with hundreds of nested DIVs and throw another "framework" JS file into the mix. We've long since outgrown the usefulness of a language meant for displaying text, and have contorted it into an interpreted VM-based applications development framework that consumes memory by the gigabyte. Crazy.

Three questions:

Will it have any "character flaw"?
- My first Raspberry had the naughty habit of corrupting SD cards if underpowered... at least it didn't kill them.
- Other Raspberries are timid, so if you try to make a picture with flash they'll reset.
- Some people said that Raspberry Pi 3 overheated, but I hadn't any trouble.

Will it need some kind of heatsink?

How much memory would you install? 256Kb (first one) was small, 512Kb is enough for most applications, and 1Gb works great. So would you go on the 2Gb or 4Gb model?

Come on guys... We all know it will be used for RetroPIE gaming. 😁 😁 😁

Zup wrote:

How much memory would you install?

Personally, the most. *nix, which Raspbian belongs to, has that philosophy that unused memory equals wasted memory.
No matter what, *.nix will find a way to make use of memory, taking it away for free use by user applications.
(Of course, *.nix will give it back to applications at *some* point, but that's another story. 😉 )

I love the pi, the concept and obliquity make many things possible or accessible.
However, I feel sorry for all the people who went all out on accessories to run emulators on their HDTV; they can't understand why their favourite games from the 80’s and 90's are not as they remember.
Just the ~50ms lag from a "good" TV is enough to make something like Tyson's Punch Out impossible without adding the total of around 100ms from emulation on a pi 3.
Hopefully it'll be better on the pi 4 but I doubt that all the sources of lag will be solved any time soon.

BushLin wrote:

I love the pi, the concept and obliquity make many things possible or accessible. However, I feel sorry for all the people who […]
Show full quote

I love the pi, the concept and obliquity make many things possible or accessible.
However, I feel sorry for all the people who went all out on accessories to run emulators on their HDTV; they can't understand why their favourite games from the 80’s and 90's are not as they remember.
Just the ~50ms lag from a "good" TV is enough to make something like Tyson's Punch Out impossible without adding the total of around 100ms from emulation on a pi 3.
Hopefully it'll be better on the pi 4 but I doubt that all the sources of lag will be solved any time soon.

When I played around with Pi 3 and retropie I first had absolutely horrible lag, but disabling v-sync fixed it. I'm not super sensitive to input lag when using a controller and I have no idea how laggy the old hd ready tv I was using for it was (ten years old, doesn't have game mode to reduce lag), but after disabling v-sync the lag certainly wasn't anywhere near ~150ms. Even I would have noticed it if it was that high even with a controller.

Pretty sure it was around 100ms at the most on my tv. Though I'm sure that's not great when compared to a CRT and original hw.