After trying the Model A+ I thought I'd dig out my 1st Gen Model B, its equally fast to set up, and equally slow to compile, though the benefit of a network port makes the file transfers a bit quicker..

It of course is as under powered as the A+, though its little bit of extra memory seems to give it a boost.  But its just as effective as any other Raspberry, it chugs, but it does all its asked to do. It should run the 2D stuff quite well, but like the A+ I wouldn't use this for any serious 3D stuff.

Actually though, as I write this, I adapted some of the set up, and with a bit of optimizing, and change to the screen rez, with a proper delta time system it may be able to run a full demo, culling the render for the base objects raised the frame rate from 15 to nearly 30..so, maybe!

No fancy set ups needed, just install the usual libs, and build, go make a cup of tea and come back in 10-15 mins for your 1st build, or more sensibly, use an on devsystem build toolchain

Just to prove a point I pulled out a Raspberry A+ from the drawer, set it for 96K gpu and did an update/upgrade cycle on it.

And thats all I had to do, like all Raspberries it's rock solid, no need to change anything in a standard Raspbian set up.

Of course at 700Mhz it runs a lot  slower than a 1200Mhz Model B, but I'm not using multi core's on the 3 so any difference in speed is mainly due to clock speed. I could ramp it up to 1Ghz, and that would indeed help, since a 1st time compile takes a very long time, but sticking with the don't change anything that works, mantra I've tried to use, I let it build on target with 1 core... and..waited and waited, it took close to 30 mins to compile

The maze demo can't run very fast at all though, only 15fps on a 1024/768 screen... 

So yeah, slow as treacle, but it does work, reducing the frame buffer resolution might make it a bit more manageable, but its never going to be very fast.

I think this particular board has had a lot of press, most of it bad, and justifiably so, it has a lot wrong with it. But since I only really care about its ability to compile and run games, I don't really care about its other problems which are well documented on its forums.

I bought this when it came out as a kickstarter, it was my first ever experience of kickstarter, and I waited for it to arrive with baited breath, and waited, and waited...and....

well eventually it did arrive, but as is often the case the software was beyond terrible, and after a few attempts to get it to work, I gave up. It had so much promise with 2G RAM, and a quad core 64bit CPU, though a Mali400Mp2 is ancient it is a solid system..I had hoped for a lot more.

But time passes people stuck with it, and there are now several new OS's available, software has been patched and played with and the latest version of Ubuntu is actually quite nice and solid, unlike the version I tried a year or so back..
So lets try the 3DMaze demo..

1st things 1st, do we have drivers...no..well that's no surprise. But installing GLMark2-ES2 shows that it has something somewhere since it can run it.........very very slow, and not identifying as Mali400Mp2 as it should but instead as a generic ES3.0 Mesa 17.2.8 which is a sure sign of emulation.

Reinstalling Mesa drivers to be sure showed no change...so its emulated, and slow, a score of 18 (lowest ever) but to its credit it did complete all tests.

I set up the 3DMaze test fully expecting it to bomb, and aside from the need to sudo apt-get install build-essential it compiled and ran the project, even giving me key access.

But at only 10fps in 1024x768 window clearly its not viable.. But hats off, it does compile and it does run, but its just not accelerated on the GPU.

I wonder if any of the other OS's for it have working drivers. I will post an update with Debian and Armbian at some point.

If you have a PineA64 it will probably run the 2D code ok, but until we find an OS with drivers, avoid any real time 3D work.

I will post later

Shaders are very cool and fun to play with, but also a little tricky for beginners to get their heads around.

Fortunately OpenGLES2.0's shaders are very simple, they are 1st generation shader pairs, consisting of a Vertex and Fragment shader pair, called a Program Object, or PO.
The vast majority of the current crop of SBC's use OpenGLES2.0 and with that GLSL 1.0 is the main format. Its a very simple and easy to follow format but do consider that our GPU's are very simple systems, and often only have dual core systems compared to the many hundreds of cores our PC's have.
 

So while its quite possible to get a high end PC shader to work on something like a Raspberry, its performance will be impacted by the low core count and clock speed of an SBC. This makes shaders quite a challenge to write, they need to be very very efficient, and as simple as possible. Though it is still fun to see a complex shader render scenes that are not possible to use in real time.
Basically though GLSL1.0 is a simple language it can do many many things, just not very fast...limit your expectations, but always push your boundries.

I will post a few shaders here for users and students to make use of, but there is an assumption that you will be aware of how to load and compile and feed your shaders, and have your own shader manager in place.

Anyone who wants to include their own shaders is free to do so.

I will post soon

I will post soon

I'll post soon

to add soon

This is a teaser

I'll post info on loading MD2's shortly