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More boards are now on the market
#1
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.
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 



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#2
The DragonBoard 410C with Qualcomm SnapDragon 410 supports OpenGL ES 3.0

https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/...board-410c

The Qualcomm SnapDragon 675 Mobile Platform is supposed to support OpenGL ES 3.2 but I am not sure if it is out yet.
https://www.khronos.org/news/permalink/q...and-vulkan
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#3
yes I forgot that, I have the 410c too, but never managed to get very far with it
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 



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#4
I had another go on the 410c and got some test projects working, though the software is a bit more mature now and it does compile the demo's the Mesa libs seem to be emulating and the GPU is not operating at its full capability. So demo's running at half speed. Also while compiling it really throttles back due to overheating, so its standard heat sink just can't cope

It'll still be useful for testing/creating OpenGLES3.0 demos, but until they release proper GPU drivers for it, its not giving us the performance GLMark2-es2 seems to suggest it can.
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 



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#5
Brian, Nice!

This seems like a popular chip used in mobile devices so it is surprising there are not more resources for the OpenGl-ES software. I guess they only release stuff to vendors using this.

I'm looking to get one of these just to have it to work with.
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#6
and the Pi4 has hit the market and indeed has GLES3.0 on board
it apparently also has partial 3.2 but if its incomplete it might be best to wait till they get full drivers on board.
For now though I will be experimenting a lot more with OpenGLES3.0
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 



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