deerwings wrote: ↑Tue 24 Sep 2019 03:22
My understanding is that hardware acceleration will be part of the new SOC, something that the old SOC was lacking because of proprietary blobs. So even if it's 'slower' than the original Retrostone, the new hardware will actually likely be faster for most things. Proper hardware acceleration will improve performance so much more.
Actually there's more to it : the Allwinner H3 which is inside of the Retrostone 1, can also use an upstream version of Linux as well as the open source GPU drivers.
The issue is that upstream does not support composite output, meaning that you also can't use the open source GPU driver.
There's another, more recent kernel release (4.12) that seem to support TV out but its still too old for the open source GPU drivers or Cedrus.
This means that the only way to achieve 3D acceleration on that practically is to use the old kernel and the proprietary GPU drivers, which have a number of issues.
Building the legacy kernel from source is also very non standard and an exercise in frustration.
Because the Retrostone 2 uses an RGB screen and support for the Allwinner A20 is much better (apart from HDMI audio, which is missing), this means that we can use upstream on that device. However, Pierre & the RetroOrangePi team are still going (at least initially) to use the legacy kernel so in that case, it won't benefit from the open source GPU drivers and still use the old ass proprietary ones.
Once pierre sends me his sample, i'll work on a new CFW for it using the mainline drivers, even if for the lack of HDMI audio. (which can always be worked around with the headphone jack port while they work on it)