01-31-2019, 09:57 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-31-2019, 10:02 AM by Brian Beuken.)
I've not had a proper chance to give much coding advice on 3.0 or 3.1 or 3.2 but there has been a real boom in the last year of boards coming on the market which have the capability to run 3.0+
Sadly of course many of these boards don't actually have drivers to run even 2.0 but its starting to come through. I suspect strongly (but I honestly have no insight here) that Raspberry Pi4 will feature OpenGLES3.0+ so its going to be a big leap in terms of what you can do with your graphics.
But a word of caution.. Though for sure we can do more and there are some optimisations possible, we still only have a limited number of cores on our SBC GPU's so for the most part we will find things easier to do, but performance won't be massively improved (though there are some clear performance boosts), the best performance gains will come from letting the GPU handle things itself and avoid feeding it as is often the case 2.0.
A few boards that we should look out for include
The Tinkerboard has now reached a quite stable level of support with drivers now available and it is a nice system it certainly handles 3.0, but 3.1 and 3.2 should also be possible (drivers!!!)
The Nano Pi T4/M4/Neo4 range... lovely machines, and very affordable, software is still a little behind and the OS can crash, but it is codeable
The RockPro64 one of several RK3399 based SBC(like the nanopi's) I don't have one yet but it looks like it has good support.
The RockPi4 hard to get hold of at the moment and I don't have one yet but I'm hearing nice things, though can't be 100% sure of CPU drivers
Any Allwinner H6 should have at least 3.0 but good luck finding an OS with drivers, I'm looking at you BananaPi and Orange Pi, though I'm sure Armbian will get there soon.
Sadly of course many of these boards don't actually have drivers to run even 2.0 but its starting to come through. I suspect strongly (but I honestly have no insight here) that Raspberry Pi4 will feature OpenGLES3.0+ so its going to be a big leap in terms of what you can do with your graphics.
But a word of caution.. Though for sure we can do more and there are some optimisations possible, we still only have a limited number of cores on our SBC GPU's so for the most part we will find things easier to do, but performance won't be massively improved (though there are some clear performance boosts), the best performance gains will come from letting the GPU handle things itself and avoid feeding it as is often the case 2.0.
A few boards that we should look out for include
The Tinkerboard has now reached a quite stable level of support with drivers now available and it is a nice system it certainly handles 3.0, but 3.1 and 3.2 should also be possible (drivers!!!)
The Nano Pi T4/M4/Neo4 range... lovely machines, and very affordable, software is still a little behind and the OS can crash, but it is codeable
The RockPro64 one of several RK3399 based SBC(like the nanopi's) I don't have one yet but it looks like it has good support.
The RockPi4 hard to get hold of at the moment and I don't have one yet but I'm hearing nice things, though can't be 100% sure of CPU drivers
Any Allwinner H6 should have at least 3.0 but good luck finding an OS with drivers, I'm looking at you BananaPi and Orange Pi, though I'm sure Armbian will get there soon.
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