Minecraft on Pandora


So probably safe to say that Minecraft is pretty GPU bound. I don't even want to think about how the Pandora's GPU would stack up against even the likes of a built in laptop GPU.
 
With their remarkable ability to barely outclass an almost non-functional laptop from 1999, the various netbooks I've had the misfortune of trying to use have managed to run applications somewhat slowly, kinda play flash(usually without too bad of an issue), barely operate PDFs, &, fortunately, did not explode.


While impressive, it's not exactly winning them any awards since the Open Pandora can nearly do those things(minus the not exploding part) & it's Linux-based & has lower hardware specs.


Now, that said, tablets aren't too bad. They're considerably more capable than most netbooks despite having comparable specs.
 
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With their remarkable ability to barely outclass an almost non-functional laptop from 1999, the various netbooks I've had the misfortune of trying to use have managed to run applications somewhat slowly, kinda play flash(usually without too bad of an issue), barely operate PDFs, &, fortunately, did not explode.


While impressive, it's not exactly winning them any awards since the Open Pandora can nearly do those things(minus the not exploding part) & it's Linux-based & has lower hardware specs.


Now, that said, tablets aren't too bad. They're considerably more capable than most netbooks despite having comparable specs.
Which netbooks are you talking about? The ones I am used to are an atom 1.6Ghz processor with 1GB of ram and handle video gracefully.
 
It might be on par with a netbook GPU. Those things are pretty much garbage & can barely render internet video.

from what I remember the poulsbo chipset seen long ago in netbook was using a SGX535 VS our SGX530 (did I messup the number?) it's basically the same but with two time the polygone/second... so yes, the same but worst...
 
Yes, and the windows driver for the SGX were quite bad... the interesting question is: are the driver used on the pandora any better?
 
Which netbooks are you talking about? The ones I am used to are an atom 1.6Ghz processor with 1GB of ram and handle video gracefully.

WHat format of video ? I doubt you can watch even HD-ready videos on a netbook. (720p). Unless you have a special GPU under the hood, but it's not very much standard in netbooks.
 
A big issue with lower spec devices is software, including applications & drivers. I think that's a big factor in why netbooks fail but tablets work. After all, it's why flash anything doesn't do too hot on the Pandora.

For flash I doubt it's only driver related. You have used Flash on Desktop Linux before ? Even on powerful desktops with well supported hardware like nVidia cards, it has taken a while until Flash's performance on Linux came close to the one on Windows.


It's not drivers, it's just Flash itself, and the ARM build.
 
yes, definately flash sucks, but it's not related to minecraft at all...
 
The problem is, it uses Java, which runs very slowly on anything.

You sure made me laugh a lot! Would you please document yourself a bit before making such silly statements?


I've been a professional Java developer for 10+ years so I believe I know quite a bit about Java performance. Java 10 years ago was slow, but today there are enough benchmarks to show that Java outperforms C++ on a bunch of classic algorithms (and I'm talking about Java running on a JVM, not natively compiled).


True, Java is not the mainline tech when it comes to games, but you already get very neat OpenGL native libraries. Check out the web for a bunch of interesting Java game engines. The whole game industry is C++ oriented because it's much older than Java, and the mainstream gaming technology are centered on either DirectX or OpenGL.


Minecraft is slow because it's code is not properly optimized, Notch himself recognized that. And I'm not talking about the graphics code, but about the world generation code, which is by the way extremely ambitious.
 
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but today there are enough benchmarks to show that Java outperforms C++ on a bunch of classic algorithms

would you please develop that part a bit? I can imagine java being optimised enough to get more or less the same performance you get with C++ but I can't imagine how you could get better performance except if the C++ examples are badly coded... that really interest me
 
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http://keithlea.com/javabench/data

Every form of Sun's Java runtime comes with both the "client VM" and the "server VM." Unfortunately, Java applications and applets run by default in the client VM. The Server VM is much faster than the Client VM, but it has the downside of taking around 10% longer to start up, and it uses more memory.
 
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interesting link, but it seems quite old, and the link leads to tests that gives more apropriate results... java server is faster than C# but a little slower (not that much) than C++ there... my only regret is that you only got G++ and Mono as "compiler", i'dd like to see how the microsoft compiler perform... one more question, why the hell are we using the client JVM?
 
That reminds me, is there *any* java-program on the pandora that doesn't start with a crawl and then run out of memory?
http://www.brettspielwelt.de/


This was the reason I built Java, so that I could play Dominion on the go.

one more question, why the hell are we using the client JVM?
client/server is only a distinction for the SUN JVM. As far as I know, OpenJDK doesn't make the distinction.
 
A big issue with lower spec devices is software, including applications & drivers. I think that's a big factor in why netbooks fail but tablets work. After all, it's why flash anything doesn't do too hot on the Pandora.

For flash I doubt it's only driver related. You have used Flash on Desktop Linux before ? Even on powerful desktops with well supported hardware like nVidia cards, it has taken a while until Flash's performance on Linux came close to the one on Windows.


It's not drivers, it's just Flash itself, and the ARM build.
Yeah, like I said, software issues.


Anywayz. I think the reason Java was the programing language of choice for Minecraft is because it's a bit easier to program in than C++, safer to program in than C++, & is easier to port to the various operating systems because of how Java works. Since Notch is notoriously terrible at programing, it makes sense to go that route.


Unfortunately, that game used to be the Java equivalent of Crysis in terms running harshly. That's probly why the first thing the proper development team for Minecraft did as soon as they were formed was start working on cleaning up the code to fix some of that.
 
On a sidenote: Human beings generally can't perceive higher than 60fps

You sure about that? I've never seen any monitors that support higher refresh rates than 60 Hz (not saying they don't exist, just that they seem uncommon). If the monitor only refreshes 60 times a second, it's not human perception that matters; you can't see 120 FPS because the screen is really only refreshing 60 times per second, even if 120 loops are happening per second.


Regarding Java's speed, I don't get the stigma that high-level languages are slow. I'm not familiar with Java, but the impression I get is it's really fast (mostly because of a JIT compiler, AFAIK), which doesn't surprise me at all. PyPy, for example, has benchmarks showing that certain operations are faster in it than in lower level languages like C, IIRC (or maybe that was Psyco, the older Python JIT compiler project). This doesn't mean that PyPy is necessarily faster than C, but it means that it can be just as fast or, on some rare occasions, faster.
 
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