07-12-2019, 12:55 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-13-2019, 11:20 AM by Brian Beuken.)
I have had a little time to play with the Pi4 this week, going to try to do some coding this weekend to remove dependance on X11 and use variable size renderbuffers...This has an impact on performance as I currently can't set the render buffer to the more SBC friendly half 1080p size, but I'll work on it. Running full screen the Pi4 is working pefectly with mesa drivers, but only 25-30fps full screen (60+ half screen res though) and I can't wait to develop some OpenGLES3.0 tests. I'm pretty sure 3.1 will come along sometime soon.
But one thing is clear... it is a hot system, and it can overheat and throttle which kills performance. I put on a small standard heatsink and it did ok with that, but with heavy game testing it does still end up overheating. So I added a small low rev 5v mini fan to the case to blow air over the heatsink and other board componants and now the system stays pretty steady under stress at 55deg, well below the 80deg throttle point. I am not really a big fan of ermmm, fans, but this is quiet and since it does dramaticlly help its good to have
Don't put it in the rather small official case unless you cut a hole for a fan to go in. That case is just a sauna when it starts up and it throttles back very quickly. I put mine in a perspex sandwich type case, but might buy another 1G unit to fit in the case as a test system for overheat tests.
A few interesting things I discovered too, was that it runs CPU sysbench tests for CPU and Memory quite a bit faster than the XU4, (using 4 cores), thats impressive.
I tried to do I/Oo tests but they were very slow to set up, and besides, unless I was using identical SD cards it would not really be a fair test.
But one thing is clear... it is a hot system, and it can overheat and throttle which kills performance. I put on a small standard heatsink and it did ok with that, but with heavy game testing it does still end up overheating. So I added a small low rev 5v mini fan to the case to blow air over the heatsink and other board componants and now the system stays pretty steady under stress at 55deg, well below the 80deg throttle point. I am not really a big fan of ermmm, fans, but this is quiet and since it does dramaticlly help its good to have
Don't put it in the rather small official case unless you cut a hole for a fan to go in. That case is just a sauna when it starts up and it throttles back very quickly. I put mine in a perspex sandwich type case, but might buy another 1G unit to fit in the case as a test system for overheat tests.
A few interesting things I discovered too, was that it runs CPU sysbench tests for CPU and Memory quite a bit faster than the XU4, (using 4 cores), thats impressive.
I tried to do I/Oo tests but they were very slow to set up, and besides, unless I was using identical SD cards it would not really be a fair test.
Brian Beuken
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's